The desire for worth was referred to as a human character, absent in the animals where there is only a desire for satisfaction. The two are analogous, and yet fundamentally different. Pleasure is craved; worth is what we feel we ought to crave. The two have been confused, with the worst results for psychology and ethics. There has been a similar confusion between personality and persons, between recognition and memory, sexuality and love.
All these antitheses have been continually confused, and, what is even more striking, almost always by men with the same views and theories, and with the same object—that of trying to obliterate the difference between man and the lower animals.
There are other less known distinctions which have been equally neglected. Limited consciousness is an animal trait; the active power of noticing is a purely human one. It is evident that there is something in common in the two facts, but still they are very different. Desire, or impulse, and will are nearly always spoken of as if they were identical. The former is common to all living creatures, but man has, in addition, a will, which is free, and no factor of psychology, because it is the foundation of all psychological experiences. The identification of impulse and will is not solely due to Darwin; it occurred also in Schopenhauer’s conception of the will, which was sometimes biological, sometimes purely philosophical.
I may group the two sets of factors as follows:
| Common to men and animals, fundamentally organic. | Limited to mankind, and in particular to the males of mankind. |
| Individuation. | Individuality. |
| Recognition. | Memory. |
| Pleasure. | Sense of worth or value. |
| Sexual desire. | Love. |
| Limitation of the field of consciousness. | Faculty of “taking notice.” |
| Impulse. | Will. |
The series shows that man possesses not only each character which is found in all living things, but also an analogous and higher character peculiar to himself. The old tendency at once to identify the two series and to contrast them seems to show the existence of something binding together the two series, and at the same time separating them. One may recall in this connection the Buddhistic conception of there being in man a superstructure added to the characters of lower existences. It is as if man possessed all the properties of the beasts, with, in each case, some special quality added. What is this that has been added? How far does it resemble, and in what respects does it differ from, the more primitive set?
The terms in the left-hand row are fundamental characteristics of all animal and vegetable life. All such life is individual life, not the life of undivided masses; it manifests itself as the impulse to satisfy needs, as sexual impulse for the purpose of reproduction. Individuality, memory, will, love, are those qualities of a second life, which, although related to organic life to a certain extent, are toto cœlo different from it.
This brings us face to face with the religious idea of the eternal, higher, new life, and especially with the Christian form of it.
As well as a share in organic life, man shares another life, the ζωη αιωνιος of the New Dispensation. Just as all earthly life is sustained by earthly food, this other life requires spiritual sustenance (symbolised in the communion service). The birth and death of the former have their counterparts in the latter—the moral re-birth of man, the “regeneration”—and the end: the final loss of the soul through error or crime. The one is determined from without by the bonds of natural causation; the other is ruled by the moral imperative from within. The one is limited and confined to a definite purpose; the other is unlimited, eternal and moral. The characters which are in the left row are common to all forms of lower life; those in the right-hand column are the corresponding presages of eternal life, manifestations of a higher existence in which man, and only man, has a share. The perpetual intermingling and the fresh complications which arise between the higher and lower natures are the making of all history of the human mind; this is the plot of the history of the universe.
It is possible that some may perceive in this second life something which in man might have been derived from the other lower characters; such a possibility dismiss at once.