Time & Perspective Quote by Samuel Alexander

Alexander frames desire less as a feeling you have than as a hostile takeover you half-consent to. The word choice is doing the heavy lifting: "invasion" makes desire bodily and political, a foreign power breaching borders. Yet the invader never quite becomes sovereign. Desire "sets going" the mind's machinery, recruiting memory, imagination, anticipation, self-justification - whole constellations of thought that suddenly orbit a single wish. Anyone who has tried to work while craving a message, a drink, a victory knows the phenomenology: attention becomes occupied territory.

The twist is his refusal to let desire count as possession. "So long as it remains desire", it cannot "get possession of the self". That's a philosophical demotion with ethical bite. If desire is defined by non-fulfillment, then the self stays, in some last precinct, unowned - not free from disturbance, but not fully annexed. Alexander is interested in that gap because it marks agency. Desire can mobilize psychic processes without becoming identical to you; it can commandeer your inner labor while still being, in principle, resistible.

Context matters: early 20th-century philosophy is obsessed with mind in motion - the texture of consciousness, the mechanics of will, the relation between impulse and action. Psychoanalysis is in the air, but Alexander keeps a metaphysician's distance, treating the psyche as a system of processes rather than a confessional. Subtext: modern life manufactures wishes faster than it can satisfy them, and the self is increasingly a battleground of partial occupations. Desire is not your truth; it's an event that tests the borders of personhood.