But, surrounding the uncertainties of technical psychology, there is a world of certainties, or at least assumptions, on the part of “practical” men. The nature of “human nature” has become everybody’s concern. From our sex-tangles up through our industrial and economic tangles to our international tangles, some notion of human motives is a controlling factor in thought and policy. Literature is, of course, saturated with assumptions concerning the springs of action. With great frequency in recent years exposition of such assumptions has been the theme of fiction and of drama. The schools and the churches, on their part, make one or another view of our motives the base-line of all their planning. A general survey of this partly technical but mostly untechnical mass of opinions appears to be worth undertaking. It is doubly needed just now because there is extensive and growing dissent from assumptions concerning the inherent nobility of our nature that were taken for granted not so long ago. We have entered upon a period of spiritual depression. The opinion may be ventured, moreover, that some view of human motives is going to be the turning point of every perilous issue in modern life and civilization. This is the area that I have surveyed. I have done it with any critical apparatus that I could lay my hands upon, not scrupling to place side by side considerations drawn from psychology, biology, current history, education, and common experience. Throughout my treatment of this theme I have freely applied valuational terms such as “good,” “bad,” “high,” and “low” to facts of conduct and to motives, and I have treated various experiences as desirable or undesirable. This involves an assumption, of course. For it is possible to entertain a view of motivation that forbids us to think that anything is better than anything else. I bring to life; I bring to death. I know no more. It has seemed unnecessary to confront this view with a theory of valuation; rather, I have taken for granted--as even the exponents of a-morality do when their theory has to be defended--that better and worse have objective meaning. Further, I have assumed the validity of the general trend of valuations that has already put the common good above egoistic satisfactions, and that would add to physiological welfare a growing experience of knowledge, beauty, and fellowship.