At the first moment desire is anterior to all experience, to every consideration of pleasure or of pain; it acts as a blind force; it is a vis a tergo, a propulsion only explicable by the physical and mental organism. It must necessarily act at once without knowing whither it goes, else it would act too late or not at all.

At the second moment, it is guided by experience and rests on proved pleasure or pain, seeking one and avoiding the other. It is to this moment that the sayings above quoted apply. That is the final form, and it embraces the immense majority of cases. Even in the adult, however, we have noted examples of vague desire, without object or determined aim.

Blind impulse, when it reaches its end, finds its satisfaction there, and seeks it anew because it is pleasant. But the pleasant and the unpleasant are relative qualities, varying in individuals, and at different moments in the same individual. If the physical and mental organisation changes, the impulses, the position of pleasure and pain change also; pathology furnishes us with unquestionable proof.

Impulse, therefore, is the primordial fact in the life of the feelings, and I cannot better conclude than by borrowing from Spinoza a passage which sums up the whole spirit of this book: “Appetite is the very essence of man, from which necessarily flow all those things which seem to preserve him.... Between appetite and desire there is no difference, save that desire is self-conscious appetite. It follows from all this that we desire and follow after nothing because we deem it to be good, but on the contrary deem that to be good which we desire and follow after.”[[259]]

INDEX.