As to the kinds of retrospective emotion the largest division is, of course, into the painful and pleasurable. We have touched only on some of the painful, but each painful emotion has its analogous pleasurable emotion. We have used the terms sorrow and grief as synonyms. If we should make a distinction, it would be to put sadness or sorrow in antithesis to happiness, and grief to joy; that is, sorrow proceeds from outward circumstances, grief from subjective conditions. However, popular usage is not firm on this point. Regret is a mild sorrow. Remorse is the ethical side of sorrow. Resignation is a very late phase of emotion related to sorrow. A person says, My child was crushed in the accident, yet I do not grieve, but am quite resigned. Here certainly is a new mode of feeling about past harm, and it is a mode as far above sorrow proper as sorrow is above anger in the evolutionary scale. We do not lament or weep over the past, but there is self-conscious, self-constrained sinking of the will, and a composure which is not apathy, but a gentle emotion wave. Nor is there a callousness; one is not hardened, but softened, and made the more sensitive. The emotion of resignation is thus cultivated and to be cultivated, and is yet in the volition stage which marks the early form of all emotions. Even in the highest human types resignation does not come, it must be brought; the instinctive impulse upon contemplating past personal evil is toward sorrow or anger and revenge, which must be checked, and resignation directly willed and assumed as the proper emotion. Resignation, then, as a growing point in psychic evolution, a distinct attainment as frame of mind, is generally and rightly accounted a virtue. At present, then, it seems the culmination of retrospective emotion with regard to past personal injuries, and it exercises and will more and more exercise a most important function in human psychic development.
CHAPTER XIII
DESIRE
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 only 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 but 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 desires 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 may 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 eating 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 Höffding (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 to 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.