Abstract

We may look at the relation of will and motive from another side as follows: Will, we have said, is an individual response to an individual situation. Like the situation itself, it is not a fixed thing persisting through change, but involved in a continuous flow of change, re-adapting itself constantly in one respect or another to recognized changes of circumstance. It can have no more immutability than circumstance, and if it is not to be left behind in the march of events and become old-fashioned, it should have the capacity for the same rapidity of change. Now motives also change, but in a different way. First one motive operates, then another, as circum-