That some value as a revealer of ourselves to ourselves may reside in even a distorted image must be granted. The literature in question is uncovering naïve insincerities and evasions that infest our life, and it is almost compelling us to see that there are forces within and around us that require a rational control that never yet has been provided. Nevertheless, in this total phenomenon we are witnessing one of the literary fashions that have succeeded one another for thousands of years. These pictures have truth in them, but it is truth selected and isolated in accordance with a mood, a drift, a spirit of the times, and then imaginatively reorganized in the interest of composition or picture-making. The literature of tomorrow will turn to other phases of experience, other types of motivation, and it will leave a different taste in the mouth of readers and theater-goers. It turns out, then, that the psychology of motivation, and the quasi-psychology of it, have drifted here and there into disillusioning allegations, but without definitely proving them. On the one hand we have the hang-over of an unworkable theory of instincts; a decadent atomistic point of view and method; behavioristic metaphysics based upon nothing more substantial than a preference as to what one shall attend to; hasty inferences from the results of intelligence-testing; the rough-and-ready symbols of practicing psychiatrists, and literary exploitation of the whole. On the other hand, we find failure of every theory that assimilates human motivation in its totality to either the movements of matter or the impulses of the lower animals, and instead, growth of contrary views within general science and specifically within psychology; in particular, a definite reaffirmation that the individual mind acts as a true integer, a genuine one-in-many. This does not solve our whole problem; we still have much to learn about ourselves. But it furnishes at least a “not proved” to set against our temptation too easily to believe the loud voices of disillusionment. It furnishes, likewise, a visa for those who would travel outside of technical psychology in order to see more of humanity. We should not be surprised if we find organization of drives by some sort of ruling drive; the consequent shifting of satisfactions and dissatisfactions, approvals and disapprovals; the possible approval or disapproval of the ruling drive, with consequent redirection of the central tendency. All this implies, likewise, readiness to question the extent and significance of the term “drive.” Perhaps we are moved only in part by a _vis a tergo_; possibly man is a forward-reacher, an initiator, a creator. And perhaps this disillusionment that threatens or seems to threaten paralysis of our wants may turn out to be the vague, confused beginning of a new want, the darkness upon the face of the deep whence a new world is to appear. Note. The authors and works referred to in this Chapter are as follows: