There is an old distinction, which is both useful and necessary though it frequently is ignored, between two senses of the term “motive.” This term sometimes signifies psychic pressure in one direction or another without forethought or consideration of results--what one may call a _vis a tergo_ or “push from behind.” In this sense, thirst for water, or sex-hunger, or spontaneous liking or disliking counts as a motive. On the other hand, an end-in-view, something that awakens desire when we think about it, a “pull from in front,” likewise goes under the name of motive. The difference between a psychic push and a psychic pull is not merely that between immediate and postponed fulfillment of action or of satisfaction, nor yet this plus the difference between simple and complicated drives. There is a further and even more important distinction to be made. Consider, for example, the following series of cases: 1--The reaction of a carnivore upon smelling raw flesh. 2--The conduct of an acquaintance of mine who, when sugar grew scarce during the War, seized an opportunity to buy a barrel of it for the use of his family. 3--In a canyon not far from where these words are being written, a county is building a great and costly dam in order to control the flood waters of the surrounding mountain slopes. Control of these waters means safety for life and property, irrigation for orange groves, and a supply of water for domestic use. 4--An acquaintance of mine worked hard and spent little in order that a son, still a small boy, might have a college education. Meantime the state in which they lived taxed itself heavily on behalf of a system of education that reaches from the kindergarten to the university. An intimate history of the conduct of the individuals concerned in each of these cases would reveal primitive urges, as those for food, for escape from peril, for care of offspring; but in all instances except the first it would reveal also something more than just a summation of such rudimentary drives. Even in case 2 they are redirected, canalized, weighed against one another, dovetailed together, related to the whole significance of the family for its members. In cases 3 and 4 it is still more obvious that work has been done _upon_ the primitive drives, not merely by them, for there is organization of selves and organization of society that are not at all predictable from any scrutiny of raw drives; indeed, here power over conduct flows out of valuations that, a little way back in our history, could not have been felt or understood. We have reached a point where we are able to say what sort of selves we want to be; we have begun to have preferences concerning types of society; already, through law, education, religion, and eugenics we are upon the edge of deliberate control of the evolution of our species.