Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/75

 dead lift of energy, will never understand either how to secure the needed effort when it is needed nor the best way to utilize the energy aroused.

It remains to apply what has been said to the question of motivation. "Motive" is the name for the end or aim in respect to its hold on action, its power to move. It is one thing to speculate idly upon possible results, to keep them before the mind in a purely theoretical way. It is another thing for the results contemplated or projected to be so desired that the thought of them stirs endeavor. "Motive" is a name for the end in its active or dynamic capacity. It would be mere repetition of our previous analysis to show that this moving power expresses the extent to which the end foreseen is bound up with an activity with which the self is identified. It is enough to note that the motive force of an end and the interest that the end possesses are equivalent expressions of the vitality and depth of a proposed course of activity.

A word of warning may be in place against taking the idea of motivation in too personal a