[42] Constitutional Code, Introduction, § 2.
[43] Utilitarianism, chap. ii. p. 14.
[44] Mr. Leslie Stephen, who holds (Science of Ethics, p. 50) that “pain and pleasure are the sole determining causes of action,” at the same time thinks that it “will be admitted on all hands” that “we are not always determined by a calculation of pleasure to come.”
[45] Or, more precisely, ‘greatest surplus of pleasure over pain.’
[46] The qualifications and limitations which this proposition requires, before it can be accepted as strictly true, do not seem to me important for the purpose of the present argument. See Book ii. chap. ii. § [2].
[47] In the present treatise ‘Desire’ is primarily regarded as a felt impulse or stimulus to actions tending to the realisation of what is desired. There are, however, states of feeling, sometimes intense, to which the term ‘desire’ is by usage applicable, in which this impulsive quality seems to be absent or at least latent; because the realisation of the desired result is recognised as hopeless, and has long been so recognised. In such cases the ‘desire’ (so-called) remains in consciousness only as a sense of want of a recognised good, a feeling no more or otherwise impulsive than the regretful memory of past joy. That is, desire in this condition may develop a secondary impulse to voluntary day-dreaming, by which a bitter-sweet imaginary satisfaction of the want is attained; or, so far as it is painful, it may impel to action or thought which will bring about its own extinction: but its primary impulse to acts tending to realise the desired result is no longer perceptible.
With this state of mind
—“the desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow”—
I am not concerned in the present discussion. I notice it chiefly because some writers (e.g. Dr. Bain) seem to contemplate as the sole or typical case of desire, “where there is a motive and no ability to act upon it”; thus expressly excluding that condition of desire (as I use the term) which seems to me of primary importance from an ethical point of view, i.e. where action tending to bring about the desired result is conceived as at once possible.
[48] The confusion occurs in the most singular form in Hobbes, who actually identifies Pleasure and Appetite—“this motion in which consisteth pleasure, is a solicitation to draw near to the thing that pleaseth.”