BOOK I.

PROLEGOMENA, CHIEFLY PSYCHOLOGICAL.

CHAPTER I.

DESIRE AND WILL.

§ 1. INTRODUCTORY REMARK.—The questions that concern us in this chapter are essentially psychological; and most of the points on which we have to touch will be found treated, with more or less fulness, in any psychological handbook. But it seems necessary here to bring out their ethical significance. What chiefly concerns us is the nature of those activities which are described by the terms Will, and Conduct, and the relation of these to that general condition of conscious life which is described as Character. But in order to understand these it is necessary also to say something about the relationship between Desire and Will; and it is to that point that the present chapter is to be devoted.

§ 2. GENERAL Nature of Desire.-Before we consider the way in which our desires are related to the will, it is necessary to determine precisely what we are to understand by the term desire. We must not, for instance, confound human desires with the mere appetites of an animal; and there are also several other minor

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distinctions which it is necessary to keep in view. We may say, generally, that nothing is an object of desire for a man unless it is consciously regarded as a good but this remark is perhaps not very enlightening; for it would be difficult to define a good otherwise than as an object that is consciously desired. The point is, however, that in all real desire there is some object that is consciously taken as an end. Such an object consciously taken as an end in desire is what we call a good. By defining in this way, we seem to be able to avoid going round in a circle. In order to understand this point, however, it is necessary to go more into the details of the distinction between desire and other modes of activity. We may conveniently begin with those forms of activity that are lowest in the scale of life, and pass upwards from these to the highest forms of human desire and will.

§ 3. WANT AND APPETITE.-We may begin by distinguishing the appetite of an animal from the mere presence of an animal want. An animal want is in itself of the same nature as a vegetable want. It is a blind tendency towards particular ends, which are involved. in the development of the life of the animal, just as they might be also in the life of a plant. We may say, if we like, that nature wills 2 the realization of these ends; but they are not consciously willed by the animal or plant itself. In the case of an appetite, on the other hand, there is not merely a blind tendency towards a particular end; but this tendency is to a

1Cf. Aristotle's Ethics, I. i. I. : The good is that at which all things aim."

2 This conception is due to Aristotle. It is of course partly metaphorical, but suggests a teleological view of the world.

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certain extent present to consciousness. sciousness may appear partly in the form of a definite presentation of the kind of object that will satisfy a given want. The hungry lion may be more or less clearly aware of the nature of the object that it seeks. The plant, on the other hand, when it turns to the sunlight, may be said to have a want; but it cannot be supposed to have any consciousness of the nature of the object that will satisfy it. Even in the case of an animal appetite, however, the consciousness of the object is probably in most instances somewhat dim and vague. The most prominent element in the consciousness is rather the feeling of pleasure or pain than any definite presentation of an object. An unsatisfied appetite is in itself painful; whereas the satisfaction of any appetite brings with it the feeling of pleasure. These feelings form so characteristic and prominent an element in animal appetites that satisfactions of appetite are frequently referred to simply as pleasures, while unsatisfied appetites are called pains. A pleasure-seeker is generally understood to be one who seeks the satisfaction of his animal ap- · petites, or of human impulses which are akin to these appetites. A certain confusion is thus apt to arise

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1 Some psychologists (of whom I gather that Mr. Stout is one) would deny that this element is present at all.

2 It is necessary to say "in itself"; because the total effect of a consciousness of unsatisfied want is sometimes rather pleasurable than painful. Thus, moderate hunger in man, and perhaps even in animals, seems often to be rather agreeable than otherwise. The reason is probably in part that the feeling of hunger adds a pleasant stimulus to the vital energies generally, and in part that the anticipation of satisfaction is easily called up by the consciousness of want. See Note I. at the end of chap. ii.

between the satisfaction of an appetite and the agreeable feeling which accompanies it; since both are called pleasure. But with this confusion we need not at present trouble ourselves.' It is enough now to observe that pleasure and pain are the most prominent and characteristic features of animal appetite.2

§ 4. APPETITE AND DESIRE.-In the case of what is strictly called desire, there is not merely the consciousness of an object, with an accompanying feeling of pleasure and pain, but also a recognition of the object as a good, or as an element in a more or less clearly defined end. The hunger of an animal is different from the mere want of nutriment in a plant; but desire for food in a man is scarcely less different from mere hunger. A man may be hungry and yet not desire food. In the desire of food there is involved, in addition to the hunger, the representation of the food as an end which it is worth while to secure. We may express this by saying that desire implies a definite point of view, whereas there is no such implication in a mere appetite. Hunger is to all intents the same phenomenon in the brute and in the sage; but the desires of the sage and the hero are very different from those of the savage, the miser, or the epicure. The desires of different men are determined by the total nature of the point of view which the men occupy. What they desire depends on what they like; and what

1 See below, chap. ii., §§ 7 and 8.

2 Appetite is, in the Aristotelian psychology, known as éɩovpía. Desire is opeĝis. But Aristotle uses opeĝis in a wide sense, so as to include émiovμía. De Anima, II., iii. 2.

8 For a full discussion of this point, see Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, Book II., chap. ii. Cf. also Muirhead's Elements of Ethics, pp. 51-2, and Dewey's Psychology, p. 360 sqq.

they like, as Mr. Ruskin is so fond of insisting, is an exact expression of what they are. Thus, while ordinary hunger or thirst tells us nothing about the character of him who feels it, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, or after power, or after fame, is a revelation of a whole point of view. The desires of a person, therefore, are not an isolated phenomenon, but form an element in the totality, or, as we may say, the universe of his character; and it is from this point of view that we must regard them, if we are to understand their full significance.

§ 5. UNIVERSE OF DESIRE.-What is meant by saying that the desires of a human being form part of a “universe" may be made somewhat clearer by reference to a similar conception in the science of Logic. It has become a familiar thing in Logic to speak of a "universe of discourse," 3 as signifying the sphere of reference within which a particular statement is made. Thus a statement about "the gods " may be true with reference to the world as depicted in the Homeric poems, or to the world of Greek mythology generally, but may be false or meaningless if understood with reference to the world of ordinary fact. So too we may make statements about griffins and unicorns in the universe of heraldry, about fairies in the universe of romance, about Hamlet or King Lear in the universe of Shakespeare's plays, about Heaven and Hell and Purgatory in the universe of Dante's Divine Comedy; and our statements may be true within these several uni

1 Cf. Muirhead's Elemets of Ethics, p. 52.

2 Cf. Dewey's Psychology, pp. 363-4.

See Keynes's Formal Logic, pp. 137-8, Venn's Empirical Logic, p. 180, Welton's Manual of Logic, vol. i., pp. 59-60.