motivirt

Updated: May 5, 2025

Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt.

Edgar Allan Poe - The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2