Were there space, it would be instructive to trace the analysis of desire, or rather the descrip- tion of desire, in subsequent philosophical specu- lation. But that would far exceed our limits. Nor is it necessary, for there is not much to be added to the result won by Aristotle until we come to the Utilitarian school of England. Some valu- able remarks occur in Spinoza's Ethics, but the current of modern speculation on the topic was set agoing by Hobbes. For the history of the process, readers may be referred to Professor Watson's (Kingston, Canada) Hedonistic Theories, and to Dr. Albee's (Cornell University) A History of Enrjlish Utilitarianism. In addition to the account of the main ethical theory known as Utilitarianism, and a criticism of it, there will be found in these able books a particular account of that doctrine we have immediately in li.'iiid. In the posthumous work of Professor Green, l',;,l.<in. menu to Ethics, there h a lengtheneil ami imi^h,. analysis of Desire ; and in the posthumous Murk of
Professor^ Sidgwick, The Ethics of T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau, as also in the various editions of the Methods of Ethics, we find a criticism of Green. These two works represent the most recent, as they also represent the most searching, accounts of Desire which can be found in the whole range of philosophical speculation.
In the analysis of Desire, as in the analysis of Knowledge, the work of Locke was epoch-making. He stated the problem in a form which occupied the thoughts of all his successors in England. Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, Tucker, Stuart Mill, and Spencer are in the succession, and all of them attack the problem of the will from the point of view of pleasure and desire. We take the state- ment of Locke's position from the admirable work of Professor Watson, Hedonistic Theories (p. lllf.):
' Why does the same man will differently on different occasions ? The reason is to be sought in the character of Desire as the imagination of pleasure. To different persons, or to the same person under different circumstances, one pleasure presents Itself in his imagination as preferable to another. Under the impulse for knowledge one man will forget his bodily wants
study, and live for the pleasures of sense, unless he is driven to change his course by the stronger impulse of shame. But as each man's desire is determined not by him but for him, and the desire determines the will, what he prefers in any case is that which alone he can prefer, and freedom is a word without
This, then, is the problem which the majority of English ethical thinkers had before them. A man's desires are determined for him not by him, and the desire determines the will. Nor is much added to the solution of the problem from the time of Locke to that of Stuart Mill. Hume had tried to prove the utilitarian doctrine of the particular virtues, and Stuart Mill, using the same argument, sought to prove the general principle of Utility.
' The sole evidence, I apprehend, it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness' (Utilitarianism, ch. iv.). Farther on in the same chapter he identifies pleasure and desire. 'Desiring a thing and finding it pleasant, aversion to it and finding it painful, are phenomena entirely unseparable, or
• ■ Thusl
rather two parts of the same phei
y to show that people never do desire anything save : happiness. On this Sidgwick remarks : ' As a matter
In truth, the Hedonistic account of Desire, from Locke to Mill, and including Sidgwick in some measure, is inadequate, because it is too exclusively psychological. Psychology, as it is usually con- ceived, cannot give a full account of Desire. For psychology deliberately limits itself to a description of mental processes, events, and occurrences, taken in abstraction from the self whose the mental states are,and fromtheouterworld. An analysisof mental
states can never give a r plilc iuiount of the
system to which the self liri(,ii;_<, ;ni.| of tlie interests and values which are Mi.h li.riu-i i li.^y are referred to the self. Thus the |)~yi'lnilM-iral account of Desire, and its relation to will, set forth by English Hedonism, is defective, not psychologically, but in reality. It is the merit of Green, and sjiecially of those who with him have so fruitfully worked at ethical problems under the inspiration of Kant and Hegel, to point out that mental and moral values cannot be appraised, and cannot be the objects of desire, if we look at them in abstraction from the sflf, .■uid Iroiii tJHj world-system. In the Prolego- mm, I I,, Etlii.'x aii.l in the Introduction to Hume, Civ,. II ha^ liLHijIit the self in its concrete reality within the vision of English thinkers. He has
DESIRE
been ably lielped by such -WTiters as V Muiihead in his manual The Elements of Ethics, by Professor Watson in Hedonistic Theories, and Professor Mackenzie in the Manual of Ethics. Other writers might be mentioned, but these will suffice to show the signiticance of the new de- parture in Ethics, and of the introduction of the self into English philosophy. Desire, according to Green, involves consciousness of self and of an object, and is to be distinguished froin instinctive impulse, which implies only the feeling of self. A consciousness of self is something beyond self-feel- ing, is really a transformation of self-feeling. Self- consciousness being also a consciousness of objects, is thus the basis of desire and of knowledge. Even in the desire for food, what is desired is really some ulterior object, not the mere pleasure of eat- ing. But most of our desires are for objects which are not directly dependent on animal susceptibility at all, or which, even where so dependent, are transformed by the addition of new elements de- rived from self-consciousness itself. There is a real unity in all our desires, only it is the unity of the self, not the unity of desire.