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, but 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 Encyclopædia 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 most 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 that 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. Hunger 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 exercise 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.