Читать книгу An Appeal to the People in Behalf of Their Rights as Authorized Interpreters of the Bible - Catharine Esther Beecher - Страница 53

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The powers of feeling various kinds of pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, enjoyment and discomfort, are called the susceptibilities, the emotions and the feelings.

When any thing is found to be the cause of pleasurable feelings, there follows a desire to secure it, and it is called good. When any thing causes pain, a desire follows to avoid it, and it is called evil.

These desires to secure good and avoid evil are called motives (or movers), because they move the mind to action in order to secure the good desired or to escape the evil feared. The objects that cause such desires are also called motives.

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For example, gold is called the motive that led a man to murder, and the desire of gold is also called the motive of that act.4

Desires are measured as strong or weak by our own consciousness. When we desire two incompatible things and must choose one or the other, before the act of choice we are conscious that one creates a desire which is stronger than the other.

The only mode of deciding which desire is strongest, is by our own consciousness.