TITLE: What is the motivation for differential forms?
QUESTION [26 upvotes]: I am that point in my mathematical career where I am learning differential forms. I am reading from M.Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds. So far I have gone over the tensor and wedge products and their properties, defined forms, learned of their pullbacks and the properties of these pullbacks, and defined the differential operator while learning some of its properties. I am currently reading about exact/closed forms in the build up to a certain "Poincare Lemma".
While the theory all seems to be fitting together (albeit with a bit of effort), there has been a nagging question. What is the motivation here? It has been my experience that many mathematical constructions (that I have encountered at least) are done with the goal of better understanding something. I feel like this thing is missing from my understanding of differential forms. Any insight will be appreciated.

REPLY [16 votes]: Spivak seems to spend more time developing intuition in his book A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry, volume 1.  On p. 111, in chapter 4, he writes:

Classical differential geometers (and classical analysts) did not
  hesitate to talk about "infinitely small" changes $dx^i$ of the
  coordinates $x^i$, just as Leibnitz had.  No one wanted to admit that
  this was nonsense, because true results were obtained when these
  infinitely small quantities were divided into each other (provided one
  did it in the right way).
Eventually it was realized that the closest one can come to describing
  an infinitely small change is to describe a direction in which this
  change is supposed to occur, i.e., a tangent vector.  Since $df$ is
  supposed to be the infinitesimal change of $f$ under an infinitesimal
  change of the point, $df$ must be a function of this change, which
  means that $df$ should be a function on tangent vectors.  The $dx^i$
  themselves then metamorphosed into functions, and it became clear that
  they must be distinguished from the tangent vectors 
  $\partial/\partial x^i$.
Once this realization came, it was only a matter of making new
  definitions, which preserved the old notation, and waiting for
  everybody to catch up.  In short, all classical notions involving
  infinitely small quantitites became functions on tangent vectors, like
  $df$, except for quotients of infinitely small quantities, which
  became tangent vectors, like $dc/dt$.