Serendipity...

We all know, from what we experience with and within ourselves, that our conscious acts spring from our desires andour fears. Intuition tells us that that is true also of our fellows and of the higher animals. We all try to escape pain anddeath, while we seek what is pleasant. We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are soorganized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race. Hunger, love, pain, fear aresome of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation. At the same time, as social beings,we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity,and so on. All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man's actions. All such actionwould cease if those powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us. Though our conduct seems so verydifferent from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much alike in them and in us. The most evidentdifference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and bythe capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolical devices. Thought is the organizing factor in man,intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions. In that way imagination and intelligenceenter into our existence in the part of servants of the primary instincts. But their intervention makes our acts to serveever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.