you will, seems) pleasant, and only what is pleasant is desired.[1] It is the pleasure which moves, and pleasure is my pleasure, and therefore it must follow that in this sense my pleasure is my motive, and hence that I always am selfish.’ Let us examine this.
‘All that is desired is (or seems) pleasant:’ this is questionable, as we have seen, if extended to instinctive appetites. We may ask, for instance, is it pleasure which first sets the child sucking?—but this by the way. When the assertion is limited to the desire, where objects are before the consciousness, then we think it is always true that in desire the desired is pleasant, and nothing but the pleasant can be desired.
‘It is the pleasure that moves:’ then, understanding by this that what immediately determines the will is a feeling of pleasure, let us for argument’s sake admit it to be true.[2] ‘And pleasure is my pleasure:’ yes, undoubtedly—I feel what I feel, and nothing but what I feel; but such a formal assertion, as we saw, tells us nothing about the self which feels; it tells us that the mere feeling self is there, it does not tell us that any other self is not there.
‘And hence my pleasure is my motive; for it is my pleasure (or, if you will, my pain) which moves me to act; and therefore I am selfish.’ Or, putting it separately, ‘My pleasure or pain moves me;’ to this we say Yes. ‘And my pleasure is my motive;’ to this we say No, non sequitur.
The reasoning we have developed rests, in a word, on the confusion between a pleasant thought and the thought of a pleasure; between an idea of an objective act or event, contemplation of which is pleasant, and of which I desire the realization, and the idea of myself as the subject of a feeling of satisfaction which is to be. Both ideas move us; both we desire to realize: but the ideas are radically different. One, we repeat, is the mental representation of an act of will or thought, or an outward event, the
- ↑ To save space I have omitted all consideration of aversion from pain. But to avoid pain is, in respect of selfishness, admittedly the same as to seek pleasure; so we need not treat it separately.
- ↑ I believe, on the other hand, that, when put in this way, it is false. What directly moves is a felt contradiction, and this is not pleasant, though it implies an element of pleasure, and though the whole state may be pleasant (cf. p. 62, and below, p. 259). This, however, does not matter here.
