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. Craving 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 by 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 active 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, as 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. It 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 complexity is such that we may well hesitate to attribute it, as is so often and easily done, to the lowest psychisms. Since desire includes a measure of self-consciousness, and also of consciousness of pleasure, it seems improbable at first sight that such elements should exist in certain low consciousnesses where primitive organisms seem impelled by desire. However, though this a priori view has weight, it must not be allowed to be of supreme value. Yet when we fairly interpret a very simple case, as when a dog scenting and seeing meat on a shelf, is said to desire it, and so to spring for it, we certainly imply a complexity of mental activity, which might by many be thought quite beyond the power of even a very intelligent dog. We have at least the following factors:—
1. Simple scent or vision of the thing; bare presentation or representation of object.
2. Either a definite bringing up, or a mechanical re-occurrence of past pleasurable associated feelings and sensations, or both.
3. Sense of unreality.
4 Feeling of lack.
5. Pain of lack.