Definition of "motive power" []

• The power that enables something to move; also used in a figurative sense. (noun)

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• "I immediately sent for the superintendent of motive power and directed him to have posted by telegraph in every roundhouse that the request of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, of which this committee had told me, had been granted."
• "The other component of their motive power is a shire horse called Samson, which hauls the logs out of the woods, pulls a cart and ploughs the land for the longstraw they grow for thatching."
• "But he clung to the “unMarxist” idea that “pure will” could be the motive power of revolution instead of “actual conditions”; for this notion—which Lenin was one day to prove was not so far-fetched after all—he, too, was dropped from the movement."