In Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, Book ii. chaps. i. and ii. a peculiar view is taken of ``motives, of that kind by which it is the characteristic of moral or human action, to be determined''. Such motives, it is maintained, must be distinguished from desires in the sense of ``mere solicitations of which a man is conscious''; they are ``constituted by the reaction of the man's self upon these, and its identification of itself with one of them''. In fact the ``direction of the self-conscious self to the realisation of an object'' which I should call an act of will, is the phenomenon to which Green would restrict the term ``desire in that sense in which desire is the principle and notion of an imputable human action''.

The use of terms here suggested appears to me inconvenient, and the psychological analysis implied in it to a great extent erroneous. I admit that in certain simple cases of choice, where the alternatives suggested are each prompted by a single definite desire, there is no psychological inaccuracy in saying that in willing the act to which be is stimulated by any such desire the agent ``identifies himself with the desire''. But in more complex cases the phrase appears to me incorrect, as obliterating important distinctions between the two kinds of psychical phenomena which are usually and conveniently distinguished as ``desires'' and volitions. In the first place, as I have before pointed out (chap. i. §2 of this Book), it often happens that certain foreseen consequences of volition, which as foreseen are undoubtedly willed and---in a sense---chosen by the agents, are not objects of desire to him at all, but even possibly of aversion---aversion, of course, overcome by his desire of other consequences of the same act. In the second place, it is specially important, from an ethical point of view, to notice that, among the various desires or aversions aroused in us by the complex foreseen consequences of a contemplated act, there are often impulses with which we do not identify ourselves, but which we even try to suppress as far as possible: though as it is not possible to suppress them completely---especially if we do the act to which they prompt---we cannot say that they do not operate as motives.