The lowest organisms come in contact with things, have objective relations of contact, but it is quite unlikely that the earliest psychic life feels contacts, really touches things. From the objective commerce with things pleasures and pains are realized, but object is unsensed and unknown. The simplest marine forms are incessantly feeding at hazard at the prompting of a subjective lack-pain. That the lowest life is born into a nutritive medium and that at birth many later organisms are incased or in direct connection with nutritive material, shows that at the very beginning psychic life is not needed as discriminatory, but as simple subjective pain and pleasure moving to undirected activities. However, such perfect environment being rare and temporary, in its blind and senseless activity the organism is often trying to assimilate the unassimilable, or the harmful, and is often appropriating when there is no substance present. It would obviously be of great advantage if it could touch its food, have sensation as guide to activity. Thus realization of a very limited world of things arises in touch achieved during the feeding act. That which satisfies and gives pleasure is by touch discriminated from that which does not give these results. Discrimination of soft and hard is probably the earliest touch impression. The soft thing is manipulated in the feeding act as edible. But a great step is made when psychical effect of the edible is not 193only comprehended through touch in direct connection with the assimilatory act, but antecedently thereto. The animal establishes a connection between the feeling the soft thing and pleasure experience in its struggling activities. It touches more and more readily what it is assimilating, and thence rejects more easily and promptly the injurious. In appropriative effort with pleasure experience it feels the thing, cognizes in most general way its physical quality. As sensitiveness increases through struggle and natural selection the assimilatory attempt will be more and more quickly met by the touch sensation, until touch ultimately becomes precedent and actually directive to food. Recognition, in a far more emphatic way than before, becomes added to cognition; the thing is not merely known in its bare objectivity, but is recognised, identified, and has a meaning. Touch must give, not only the thing, but the thing as potent for some quality not now being appreciated, though formerly appreciated pari passu with the touching. The interpretative act comes through the association gradually established in past experiences, so that the edible is no longer fortuitously hit upon, but touch precedes active effort at appropriation, and suggests by itself edibility or non-edibility. Thus is action greatly economized and made certain. Definite feelers, extending from the body, and sometimes quite long, are evolved, and the first period in the history of knowledge, the age of touch, is inaugurated.
It is here when touch involves representation and becomes a sign of something, e.g., edible thing, that desire and other simple emotions originate. A possibility of pleasurable experience being recognised, it is necessary, if useful action would follow, that emotion springs up as incentive, and this emotion we term desire. Hunger drives, but desire draws, and as reinforcement and guide to the blind hunger impulse desire has a large function. A mere indifferent recognition, the pleasurable foreseen 194but not felt about, would be entirely unserviceable. If we do not desire the pleasurable and beneficial, we do not act for it. And originally, at least, perception of the good always stirred desire; and desire was awakened in no other way; for in the course of natural evolution, knowledge and emotions have alike to be interpreted in their origin and meaning with reference to advantageous action, this alone being the arena of natural selection. A meaningless knowledge and a self-contained emotion or feeling, are entirely contrary to the trend of evolution on the basis we have assumed. Moreover, through ages of activity the tendency to desire the good and the good only becomes so ingrained that I think it hardly fails, even in the highest and latest minds. The most hyper-conscious man, once convinced that something will give him pleasant experience, so long and so far as this feeling is dominant in mind will have incipient desire.
On this long disputed question of the relation of desire to the good or pleasurable, evolutionary psychology, which views mind as serving life, as interpreting things with reference to their serviceability and so implied pleasurability, always bases desire in its origin and growth on pleasure. But is this general point of view borne out by the facts of mind? A typical example of common desire is this: At a fair I observe a toboggan chute and say to my companion, “That must be sport, how would you like to try it?” The appeal to “sport” awakens desire in my comrade and he says, “Let’s try it.” We test its pleasurability, and, enjoying it, desire to go again. It is evident that desire arises not on the mere image of actualization as such, the idea of sliding, but on conception of its pleasure quality. Whenever by our own experience or by the testimony of others we are assured of a good thing to be experienced we straightway desire it.
This, it may be said, is all very true for a certain class of desires, but the principle does not apply in the higher 195desires like the desire for knowledge. But knowledge originates only as serviceable, and primarily only serviceable knowledges are desired. We desire knowledge only so far as it is worth having, and it may be that I esteem all knowledge as worth something and so desirable. However, some knowledges are worth nothing and are never desired. Who wants to know the exact measurements of the pebbles on the road, or how many hairs are on the mane of his neighbour’s pony, or the names of all the inhabitants of Pekin? But if one thinks it would be any satisfaction to know such facts, he may desire to know them. The insatiable curiosity of children which seeks to know all such irrelevant facts hardly comes under the category of desire, but is rather instinctive hereditary impulse. It has no clear idea of a thing to be known and a desire to know it, but is only a spontaneous outburst of knowing activity which is inbred and comes from ancestral integration. There is a sensing and perceiving activity which is very intense at the questioning age, but which hardly implies the desire to know. The incessant “What’s this?” “What’s that?” is merely outcome of an instinctive impulsion to interpret environment; it is not significant of full-formed desire, there is no idea of thing to be known, of an actualization to be accomplished.
If a man desires knowledge, not for his own sake, but for its own sake, desire as such really ceases, it merges into love and devotion, which are disinterested and clearly distinct as mental modes from desire. Desire is not a sentiment; and it does not properly include all impulse to actualization. For instance, the feeling for actualization merely as such, for achievement of ideal per se, is beyond the biologic stage of consciousness wherein desire has its chief function. The attainment of end merely for the sake of the end must be distinguished from actualizing an image for the pleasure of actualization, which thus has desire element. We know that the image of realization 196may act as end by compulsion, as in feeling of duty, which is thus marked off from desire as impulsion. Thus desire is but one mode of teleological emotion. But desire is emotion at unrealized good and not at unrealization in general.
Spinoza’s dictum, followed by Volkmann, that we do not desire a thing because we deem it good, but we deem it good because we desire it, is not borne out by the commonest facts. A peddler shows me an apple, but I do not desire it and then deem it good, but I examine it, and if it seems good I may desire and buy it, but if bad, I have aversion, and return it. My desire thus depends altogether upon whether or not I deem the apple good, and not my deeming it good upon my desire. If I see any one desiring anything I at once judge that he first thought it good or he would not have desired it. All the excitation of desire is by representation of the good. The merchant tempts you by exhibiting his goods, the child with candy offers it to you crying, “good! good!” the moralist proclaims, “do this and thou shalt live.” The cause of desire, which for weal or woe plays such a large part in almost all psychism, is always by imaging the good. The bait and the reward as excitants of desire are most common; a mere suggestion of a representation without implication of its goodliness in realization does not excite desire. Thus some one, speaking of a totally unknown town, asks, “How would you like to live in Perry?” and we answer, “Is it a pleasant town?” A mere suggestion of change of abode starts desire only when there is already displeasure with present residence, and so desire for release as a good; but image of actualization considered solely by itself is desireless. And if to excite desire we offer the good or pleasurable, to extinguish desire we offer the bad and painful. I desire a fair looking apple, but cutting it and finding it wormy and rotten, desire flees. I extinguish the desire of a child for 197eating some noxious substance by assuring it of the bad taste and nauseating effect. Both positively and negatively then, common sense finds the basis, not of the good in desire, but of desire in the good. The facts in both exciting and extinguishing desire point to this conclusion.
Spinoza (Ethics iii., Prop ix.) defines desire as “appetite with consciousness thereof.” But to be aware of being hungry is but the first step toward desire. In the midst of my daily occupations I become aware of pain, then of uneasiness, then of hunger, whereupon I may desire food, which desire includes as distinct elements: (1) idea of eating as act or movement; (2) idea of the thing eaten as food, a something satisfying; affording relief, and so a good; (3) thereupon the emotion wave of longing, the essential point in desire. This is, of course, followed by volition, I act to realize, I go to a restaurant. When H?ffding (Psychology, p. 323) says that the impulse in hunger “has reference primarily to the food, not to the feeling of pleasure in its consumption,” he forgets that “food” is a something satisfying, and only thus is desired. Object is not desired as object, but for its value in experience.
We must also touch upon a certain class of experiences which have been adduced as showing a desire not based upon the idea of the pleasure. Take the example of a man in ennui who takes to playing tennis as a relief, but with no desire of being victorious. Engaging in the game he finds that “this desire which does not exist at first is stimulated to considerable intensity by the competition itself; and in proportion as it is thus stimulated both the mere contest becomes more pleasurable, and the victory, which was originally indifferent, comes to afford a keen enjoyment.” (Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, p. 46.) But does the desire really come from some idea of pleasure? The player volleys a ball successfully against his opponent, and thereby receiving a thrill of pleasure desire awakes 198to beat. “Wouldn’t I like to beat him? I would enjoy nothing better.” This desire foresees the pleasure of triumph. If he gets no pleasure from returning the ball successfully he does not desire success; but if unanticipated pleasure comes up in beating his opponent, as soon as he recognises this pleasure he desires to continue and complete it. This pleasure in succeeding in competitive activity, extremely old and integrated from all the struggle of existence, springs up spontaneously. There may also be added pleasure from activity and pleasure from skill which will make the game very interesting, i.e., full of desire and other emotions.
Professor Sidgwick allows that pleasure may be the cause of desire, but not its object. But surely if I cognize pleasure coming from an act, I attach this pleasure to it in representation; if I take pleasure from returning a tennis ball and then represent a coming opportunity to return the ball I also represent its pleasurability. Pleasure or pain connected with acts is connected by association with representation of the acts, the pleasure-pain tone penetrates the representation, and only thus does actualization of an image become object of desire. If it is possible to conceive an activity indifferent—which may be doubted—we should have no emotion about it. But we have already sufficiently emphasized how the perceived experience quality of things determines desire and all emotion.
Professor Sidgwick’s remark that the pleasurableness of the contest is “in proportion” (Ibid., p. 46) to the desire, i.e., that the pleasure results from the desire rather than desire from the pleasure, also shows defective analysis. If I desire intensely to beat, and am on the losing side, I am greatly pained, for desire is always in itself painful. In any case desire is pleasurable only so far as it is being satisfied, which, of course, means only so far as desire is being extinguished. It is not the increasing desire intensity, 199but the decreasing, that gives pleasure, i.e., desire is negatively related to pleasure. Intense desire may act as excitement-pleasure, but this does not bear on the nature of desire.
Another objection that has been brought up against pleasure as desire basis is that “pleasures are diminished by repetition, whilst habits are strengthened by it; if the intensity of desire therefore were proportioned to the ‘pleasure value’ of its gratification, the desire for renewed gratification should diminish as this pleasure grows less, but if the present pain of restraint from action determines the intensity of desire, this should increase as the action becomes habitual.” (James Ward in Encyclop?dia Britannica, vol. xx., p. 79.)
But pleasure and so also desire often increases with repetition. One who tastes champagne for the first time may receive slight pleasure. The next time he dines out he will, with image of his previous experience, have slight desire for champagne. As experience is repeated his pleasure and desire may increase to ecstasy and passion. But habits not obviously pleasure-yielding, as the morning chore to the country lad, will be desired after intermittance; the country boy homesick in the city longs in the morning for the familiar scene and familiar task which was a source of aversion at home. We painfully miss the customary, even the painful customary, for thereby the conservative tendency of nature and organic activity is broken up. Desire arises for relief from this pain, and the habitual is so far regarded as pleasurable. Thus desire is in proportion to the “restraint” only so far as the restraint is painful, and thus relief appears pleasurable. Thus the desire for the habitual has, like other desire, its basis in prospective pleasure.
That the analysis of desire as regards representation of pleasure is still an open question certainly marks the psychology of feeling as very backward; that here is a 200most common and prominent psychosis, whose simplest analysis is not yet agreed upon, shows how far we yet are from a standard of subjective verification. I have expressed my own opinion that both the evolutionary standpoint and special analysis indicate a distinct emotion at prospective good which is best denominated by the term desire. This is a purely psychological result, and has absolutely no reference to ethics. “Pleasure” has such an inevitable ethical tinge that a purely scientific denotation would be useful. The “good” is a better, but also objectionable term. That then the organism should foresee and image the good and should have a feeling about it which should stimulate will to its appropriation and realization is a psychosis of utmost value, and one which is in all psychism above the lowest an extremely common phenomenon. This does not assert that desire in all its lower range is a seeking for pleasure, an extremely late conception and endeavour; but it means that as perception is of things in their experience values, so representation also, as giving the basis of desire; but a conscious hedonism is still afar off.
The general function which desire subserves in stimulating advantageous action is obvious. As anger and fear are primarily useful emotions in view of potential pain and harm, so desire in view of potential pleasure and benefit.
The function of desire in stimulating advantageous action is obvious. Desire answers to potential pleasure and benefit just as anger does to potential pain and harm. It is a correlative and supplement of fear, and in general the more one fears a thing the more one desires the opposite. When sailing I desire fair weather in proportion as I fear a squall. Desire is the very spring of life and progress, and when desire is extinguished the will to live ceases, and psychic life declines and dies. Fulness of desire is fulness of life, and the largest mental life is 201that in which desire, constant, multiplex, and far-reaching, is strong and dominant. Desire seems thus to be a permanent factor, and, though there is a pre-desire period, no post-desire age seems to be indicated in psychic history so far.
Somewhat as to the analysis of desire has already been intimated in touching upon its origin and function, but we are now to study its elements more in detail. The very young infant certainly experiences hunger pains in almost its initial consciousness; but it is only gradually that the need felt leads up to presentation and representation of the needed thing, and so to desire. Hunger with it, as with all organisms, sharpens the wits, and leads to knowing things, interpreting them, and acting definitely toward them. Through touch it first comes to appreciate object, and object as food, a representative–inductive act. The earliest meaning attached to object is edibility, and this, indeed, indiscriminately to all objects, as we see that infants mouth everything. Gradually from this, or by dint of a good deal of unpleasant experience, objects are divided into edible and non-edible, the primitive classification of things.
From the consideration of any such simple example as the desire for food we determine that the first element toward and in desire is a lack-pain generating felt want, and so—and such common use of words is significant—we want, i.e., desire what we are in want of. A feeling of need or lack is fundamental. Now sense of lack is more than pain from restriction or intermission, for it implies a measure of in-ground integrated experience with objects, a constant connecting of object with purely subjective experience. For instance, hunger and feeling the need of food, the craving for food, are not the same, for it is evident that to feel lack of anything with such a central pain as hunger-pain means that this something has often been conjoined with the pain experience. 202Hunger is primarily an organic uneasiness and gnawing pain which does not include any sense of object as of a food or reference thereto. Our subjective and objective experience have been so completely integrated, and feeling of lack and that for a very definite thing has become so ingrained in mind with pains, we feel so spontaneously and immediately need of thing in connection with organic pains that it is very difficult for us to realize a state where this connection has not been formed or is forming. But it would seem that the first hunger pains of the infant are of this primitive quality, and that need is not felt in connection therewith. It is only after some crude cognitions of bodies have been generated in connection with the feeding act and as guides thereto that on occasion of hunger pains there can occur the sense of lack of food object, a painful feeling of unrealization, at first very dimly representative, and so a craving, an incipient emotion. Desire rests then upon capacity to feel the lack of accustomed satisfying thing in connection with some form of perception or representation of the thing. When a satisfying object is missing, it must be missed psychically before desire can awake. The reaction when a customarily conjoined experience does not occur is a peculiar feeling in mind, a disturbance, uneasiness, a unique sense of loss and lack which is the immediate stimulus of desire. Hunger at first leads blindly to activities tending to satisfy hunger, but the satisfying thing—food—therewith becomes gradually known, hence thereafter when hunger comes there is struggle both to know and to act thereby. This struggle has impulsation from feelings of lack.
Lack pains then prompt to cognitive activities to find the thing lacked and desired. The first knowledge is that some things satisfy, and an appropriative activity is excited. The lowest organisms under impulse of hunger pains reach out after things, feel for them, and as soon as they sense the edible, appropriate it. It is quite evident that they 203exercise cognition only as driven to it, and then it is effort even for the simplest knowing. But what the first psychic facts are is hard for us to interpret, because we have progressed so far beyond them. However, we may well believe that the general form of primitive consciousness is akin to what we have when dozing or half awake. The realization of things is dim indefinite, and it is only as pains of considerable severity are felt and as the psychism gains in capacity for pain that particular knowledges and particular needs and desires are accomplished. After having repeatedly sensed something—as a soft vegetable form—in connection with bodily pain as hunger and with the feeding activity as allaying hunger, a renewal of the pain from organic conditions will give, not merely purely subjective pains, but also, as the pre-associated cognition of thing and the allaying of hunger is not experienced, there arises as reaction a vague sense of lack which may lead to equally vague desire. A vague uneasiness and restlessness which knows object and misses object only in the most general way is the lowest basis. A study of some case of waking from a doze by reason of hunger would give the original formation of desire as involving lack sense. Here a purely subjective pain gradually intensifies till it wakens a very general objectifying, and we feel need of undefined something, which soon becomes specialized, when fully wakened, to need of something to eat, and finally as need of some particular usual food, as bread, meat, or milk, which is then desired.
Pain from restriction or intermission of some organic activity, as the digestive and assimilatory, may then lead to sense of lack and desire for object which is unrealized. However, craving-desire as implying sense of loss, of something pleasurable missed, is not organic, but is mere reflex of organization. It is not progressive, but conservative; it does not initiate, it merely keeps the organism to its accustomed level. This is the limited range of appetite. 204Craving rests on past evolution. However, we have to explain the origin of those activities which, when intermitted, produce such distressful results. We must first acquire the liking before we miss what we like, and tastes uniformly originate through effort, and all pleasurable activity is built up by painful volition as urged by direct pains or by desires. Desire then is more than craving. Craving as based on organic lack is satiable, desire is insatiable. We desire what we have never missed and modes of experience we have never attained. We, who have never had a gold watch, desire one, and having received one, we lose it, miss it, and so desire is reinforced. All the progressive activity of the human world originates in desire, as ambition, or as desire of truth, virtue, etc. Here we do not miss what we are accustomed to, but we are forming habits, which will be the basis for cravings with descendants. For instance, one who now does not miss beauty of art, but is ambitiously striving to appreciate art, may come finally—or at least his descendants—to miss art, and so to crave it. But for the time he has no art craving, only an art desire. Of course all desire in the craving form, or in the higher desire form, involves a missing actualization. All desire is extinguished in realization. But this obviously does not destroy the distinction of desire as based on craving, a spontaneous resultant from integration, an intermittence of habit, and desire as itself integrating habit-forming emotion.
However, with the lowest psychisms, we may perhaps suppose it unlikely that representation does ever become definite enough for desire, except when in direct sensing of a thing, as, for example, in a touch perception. The psychism is impelled to touch activity by its subjective pains and simple, undifferentiated lack pains. It does not desire a food through the representation of it brought up by hunger, for such representation of things in their potentiality is probably not originally stimulated directly 205by subjective feelings, though with man, for instance, we know that hunger and other simple feelings will provoke representations of foods, which foods will be desired; and particularly in famine the most lively representations of feasts occur, and thus there is a strengthening and defining of desire. Thus in famine there comes a greater and greater urgency to action as its necessity becomes greater. The vivid representations of foods become through desire—though there may be no sense connection with food—a mighty force for self-preservative action.
Yet primitively desire probably awoke only after some sensing was accomplished, not the mere subjective pain, but the touch perception awoke the representation, for it would seem the original status that representation occurs at first only with correlated presentation. Thus it is that the simplest psychisms are driven by their pains to achieve a touch or some sensing of a thing before they interpret it as food, and so desire it; that is, things must have a food meaning attached to them through actual sense appreciation of them as such, before they can be directly instanced in pure representation as foods. Hunger leads us immediately to think of food, but this ability to directly represent food is based upon having thoroughly learned certain things as food by repeated direct experiences. A savage who has never seen or known of bonbons is presented with a box of them, and he may receive them with indifference, but a bonbon is placed in his mouth, whereupon he says, “it tasted so good, I want another.” Such is the genesis of desire when pleasure quality is attached to thing, is learned by experience. The visual and tactual experience is actively conjoined with pleasure experience, so that seeing another bonbon, he represents its pleasurability and so desires it.
Further, the relative presentations and feelings must be mentally correlative, the connection must be more than phenomenal series of several forms; there must be an 206active connecting psychic process as basis. You are told to open your mouth and shut your eyes, and a bonbon is dropped in; the taste will at once give rise to a revival visual presentation, and if a person holds up before your eyes a fine bonbon, saying, “look at this,” there may occur revival taste experiences. But the immediate basis of desire is not here, for if psychic process stopped here, there would be no higher elements; these can only be accomplished by a definite bringing up and attribution of subjective quality to the thing. You represent its possible pleasurableness on the basis of past experience, by the action of the inductive instinct, a complex process. Here revival is not an active correlating, but is self-contained, lying isolated by itself, and unfruitful till its revival character is recognised, and it is actively wrought into experience. That is, integrating act is presupposed in all desire.
The way in which revival becomes the basis representation is hard to trace, but in many cases it seems to be connected with certain physiological activities. A revival form implies correlated physical functions, as when the sight of a peach causes the taste pre-experienced therewith to be revived, and the mouth waters, as if in actual deglutition. As the reacting and assimilating process is carried on without any real thing to be acted upon, there comes a physiological reaction, which in turn gives rise to peculiar psychic affections, and specially the uneasy feeling of lack. The unreality and mere revival character of the revival experience is ultimately recognised, and representation becomes possible, and idea of pleasure as both experienced and experienceable is evolved. Thus an unsubstantial revival, where the thing is sensed in one form only, but thereby re-awakening other associated experiences, as in the case of merely seeing a peach, leads finally to know the thing as a potency; I taste, but after all I taste nothing; hence I am led to perceive the thing as a sign, 207as unrealized in its pleasure significance, but realizable. How we attain sense of reality and unreality we discuss in chapter on Induction, but with special reference to desire we add here an illustration. When engaged in reading on a hot day, I have feeling of discomfort, and then spontaneously arises image of a wonted bathing place, I have the image of moving in the clear, cool water, but at once recognising the unreality of the image, I long for realization. I, when heated, have so often seen the water, and plunged in it, that the presentation of mode of relief has become firmly associated with the discomfort, so when it organically returns, presentation revives, and its unreality known, desire rises. One not accustomed to bathe, but to taking lemonade when heated, will have visions of lemonade and desire therefor. One who is just forming some habit of relief will not have spontaneous images, but must call them up. Desire also will be purely general, “Oh! to get rid of this heat.” Specific desire, as founded upon a definite image of realization, is primarily the result of active association of definite object and mode with a given pleasure-pain state. The realizing the image as unreality, as suggesting an actualization to be wished for, is learned from rude experience with present sensations and perceptions quite at variance with the image. Thus, that the vision of water is unreality I know by seeing the room before me, touching the chair, sense of painful heat unrelieved, etc. An image of actualization barely of itself does not include desire. I may conceive that I can image myself moving in water without any emotion therewith connected, but as matter of fact, this never occurs; all our images of actualization carry some desire value. Even bare phantasy, as imagining myself living on the moon, is not without a tinge of desire or aversion, for the origin and growth of imaging has been so bound up with desire, and is for desire as life function that some desire tendency is retained even in the purest flights of imagination. 208It becomes increasingly evident that such a simple and understandable expression as, “I want that peach,” implies a great complexity of psychic process which is hidden from us by the summarizing facility of language. Emotion is evidently far too complex for full analysis. Its co............