ABSTRACT
In his later books, starting with Mencius upon the Mind, where he flirted with the notion, attributed to Chinese pragmatism, of there being no such thing as pure cognition, he emphasised more and more strongly the purposive nature of perception and thought. Thus, in The Philosophy 0/ Rhetoric, we find hirn saying, "Pure exposition has its guardian passions no doubt-though I do not know their names"; though he added: "they are not often as strong as the poachers1 and are easily beguiled by them".2 But in How to Read a Page, he does name them when, in asserting that "no thinking can be motiveless", that we never "in practice leave off desiring, feeling ... wanting", he suggests that "in mathematics only a very general motive-an interest in order and consistency of thought-is needed, and other motives may be irrelevant"3. This is something of a giveaway, for the motives he mentions would hardly be accepted as a satisfactory account of what the mathematician was trying to do. In so far as the mathematician's thought was purposive, in so far as he was trying to do something such as prove a given theorem, there is no reason why he should be picked out as a special case. So wh at Richards still seems to be doing is deriving from the belief that all thinking is motivated the belief that all thought has a feeling-component, which is important for his special theory of knowledge as a form of becoming.
