When there is eagerness, there are a definiteness and a force present in desire which make that desire more than usual, customary, or standard. When one thinks of desire, there is, as with everything else, a standard or average. This standard is a point which is between not more than “desire as such” and not less than “desire as such.” (See Definition of Largeness.)

Desire has dimension. Desire is, most often, wide, general, and hardly noticed. It is vague, comprehensive, continuous, undifferentiated. Then a sick person may be eager to live because he wants to do something very specific, like finishing a book, seeing a  dear friend, or just because living seems sharply important, and death seems conspicuously uninviting. Eagerness here is desire seen as having point.

Eagerness, however, can best be represented in terms of a clear and intense or forceful attitude towards a specific object. A child can be eager to eat a peach; a man can be eager to touch a hand; a woman can be eager to see what’s in a letter; and a scholar can be eager to open a book. The desire for learning may be wide and deep and constant; the desire to verify a certain passage or see a certain poem may be eager.

Eagerness represents the specificity of desire, with unusual motion or force also present. We can be said to desire to eat all the time; we are eager to eat when hungry, or when we see something especially inviting.

Eagerness in terms of feeling can be expressed by a point with propulsion behind it. Life, like other examples of motion, is wide and slow, and sharp and speedy; and it can be wide and fast, and specific and slow.

When we think of eagerness as against zeal, we can see the dimensions and shapes of desire. Zeal also is intense, but there is a wideness to the intensity and there can be a vagueness. Eagerness is like a blade of feeling, with its point moving.

All eagerness comes from existence, and all eagerness is a praise of existence in some fashion. For when we desire, we are praising. To want a thing is a commendation of that thing.

Intelligence is the shaper and mover of eagerness, when the eagerness is true. For the purpose of intelligence is to have things mean to us what, in all their joy and glory and factuality, they can mean. Intelligence itself, thought of in relation to specific aims, is eagerness. The sharp desire to learn a thing is like the sharp desire to taste a thing or touch a thing or hear a thing.

When eagerness is not equivalent to intelligence or adequate desire to know, the eagerness is that much false, or corrupt, or incomplete. Eagerness to desire is as pleasure to happiness; that is, as the specific and momentary to the general and permanent.

There should be a shapely, accurate relation of eagerness to tranquility, the point to flatness, the angle to the curve—in our lives. The eager is the self come to a point, as if two lines had met together and had added their strength to each other.

Eagerness, being related to pleasure, has, like pleasure, two sources. We can be eager out of smallness, and fear, and murky vanity; and we can be eager out of largeness, and courage, and true contentment with the self. Where eagerness does not come from a whole self, whether this is apparent or no, there is a feverishness, tangle, confusion in the self. The important purpose of the self is that it have as much desire as possible, that it be as truly based as possible, and that it be as well shaped as possible. This can be summed up in the sentence: Desire good desires. We can and do desire to have desires; and about this, as about other things, we can be adequate or inadequate.

Eagerness is at its best, warmth and subtlety and accuracy. If the world can make one eager, we should permit it to do so. It should, however, be whole eagerness that we have. We can, if we look at ourselves richly, enumerate objects of eagerness. We should be eager to see a new thing of many years ago; and we should be eager to see something true we haven’t seen of a person we know; and we should be eager to see, which means enjoy, a fruit; and we should be eager to see more clearly what certain notes of music are; and we should be eager to feel what it means to be of a morning on an ancient mountain. The eagerness should be noted and welcomed. Having right eagerness is already a bright asset.

Eagerness is a thrust of the self above the surrounding low territory. If it comes, with knowing or intelligence correctly attending and being of the eagerness, there is a duty brightly performed. The love of nature and of God and of existence shows itself in a general readiness to be eager, which readiness we can call unconscious, profound zeal. Out of this unconscious, beautiful zeal, comes again and again an instance of eagerness of which we can be proud.