Of the Interior Beginnings of Voluntary Motions; Commonly Called the Passions; and the Speeches by Which They Are Expressed
There be in animals, two sorts of “motions” peculiar to them: one called “vital”; begun in generation, and continued without interruption through their whole life; such as are the “course” of the “blood,” the “pulse,” the “breathing,” the “concoction, nutrition, excretion,” etc. , to which motions there needs no help of imagination: the other is “animal motion,” otherwise called “voluntary motion”; as to “go,” to “speak,” to “move” any of our limbs, in such manner as is first fancied in our minds. That sense is motion in the organs and interior parts of man’s body, caused by the action of the things we see, hear, etc. ; and that fancy is but the relics of the same motion, remaining after sense, has been already said in the first and second chapters. And because “going,” “speaking,” and the like voluntary motions, depend always upon a precedent thought of “whither,” “which way,” and “what”; it is evident, that the imagination is the first internal beginning of all voluntary motion. And although unstudied men do not conceive any motion at all to be there, where the thing moved is invisible; or the space it is moved in is, for the shortness of it, insensible; yet that doth not hinder, but that such motions are. For let a space be never so little, that which is moved over a greater space, whereof that little one is part, must first be moved over that. These small beginnings of motion, within the body of man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions, are commonly called “endeavour.”
This endeavour, when it is toward something which causes it, is called “appetite,” or “desire”; the latter, being the general name; and the other oftentimes restrained to signify the desire of food, namely “hunger” and “thirst.” And when the endeavour is fromward something, it is generally