Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Alexander

Alexander is doing something quietly radical here: he’s stripping “will” (conation) of its melodrama and treating it as a matter of how an object shows up in the mind. In a single sentence, he reframes motivation not as a mysterious inner push but as an exposure problem. What matters, psychologically, isn’t some private force called striving; it’s the mode of disclosure. The same “object” can arrive as a raw sensory presence, a stable perception, a fleeting image, a memory with a past attached, or an abstract thought. Each format carries its own kind of grip, its own permissions and limits for action.

The subtext is a rebuke to older faculty-psychology habits that carved the mind into separate boxes: sensation over here, intellect over there, will somewhere else. Alexander’s move is to weld them back together. Conation isn’t hovering above cognition; it is entangled with the representational vehicle. Wanting a drink when the glass is perceived in front of you is not the same psychological event as wanting it as a memory or as a thought. The “difference in conation” tracks a difference in how the world is presented, not just how hard you push.

Context matters: early 20th-century philosophy and psychology were renegotiating the borders between introspective mental life and a more systematic science of mind. Alexander, working in that in-between space, aims to make motivation intelligible without reducing it to reflex. He’s also defending a kind of realism: objects are not invented by mind; they’re “revealed” in different modes, and those modes shape what the self can do next.