Before things find themselves too bogged down in philosophical tom-foolery, Samuel Coleridge is an idiot. Meaning, he is either sorely mistaken, or sorely misunderstood. I would prefer to believe that such a worthy man would not sink into the silly confusion of forgetting that even insanity is reasonable, and so no one is truly “motiveless”. But I believe I should make clear what I speak of, since, in the last few sentences, it was rather vague. Mr. Coleridge, of indiscernible age, was said to have asserted that a certain Iago from the play “Othello” was possessed with “motiveless malignity”. Now, if nothing else, this seems a contradiction in terms. Either he was motiveless or he was malignant. If he was malignant, his motive was, essentially, malignancy. And if he was motiveless, he was sleeping in his grave and could not have possibly caused the trouble that he did. What must be concluded was that Coleridge simply had his words a little mixed up in his dear, little head. He could only have meant that Iago’s motive was purely malignancy, but that he [Coleridge] didn’t want to admit that this was a motive at all.

Yet, let us move along, and not bother with the mildly humiliating efforts of a slightly perplexed man. It seems appropriate to state at this point that I do not agree with Coleridge’s vaguely senseless description of a very horrible man. Like I deigned to state before, motiveless people are not motiveless by their own choice; they are just dead. There are no actions that have been discovered yet that do not possess their own, possibly secret, motive. Man is simply not capable of acting without a motive. When he kicks a stick with his bare foot, his motive was to occupy his foot while his thoughts wandered. When he starts spewing random facts about the state of Prussia in the thirteenth century, during an important business meeting, his motive is his own and I would need to speak with him personally to discover it. But don’t deny it; he had a motive, however difficult it may be to uncover. For all those lacking the thing called imagination, I dismiss you at this point and have no further need of your attention. Imagination is absolutely essential in examining anything, and I would rather not make a fool of myself arguing the point.