stimulus to action. What moves to action, whether that action be merely voluntary or also volitional, whether it does or does not involve a formal act of choice or resolve, is, in all and every case, the desire or the desires: and the real stimulus in desire, the direct and actual mover (whether it be pleasant or painful), is and must be always felt, and can never be thought.[1] It is impossible to bring it before the mind in such a way as to make it our object, without, as a consequence, destroying its very nature:[2] the thinking it makes a motive of it, which now, as an idea, is not a desire, but is the object of a new desire.
If it were necessary that the psychical antecedent which directly produces the act should be a motive, then no instinctive act would be possible. And in this respect what holds good of one act holds good of all; the stimulus is a feeling. My pleasure (if it be pleasure), which moves me to act, is, because it moves, therefore not my motive; and my motive, because it is my motive, therefore can not be the pleasure which moves. Admit that of several desires the strongest prevails, admit that of alternative pleasant objects we must choose the most pleasant, yet this is not to admit that we choose between the ideas of pleasures; it is not to admit that, if my choice is determined, I therefore choose that which immediately determines it. Out of the present ideas of pleasures, as such, to be had, to choose always what seems to be the greatest is selfish, but to choose what pleases me most is not selfish nor unselfish. It merely means that I choose, and says nothing whatever about what I choose.
Let us close this discussion.—Pleasure is the feeling of self-realizedness; it is affirmative self-feeling, or the feeling in the
- ↑ Of course, while being pleased by the contemplation of an object, you can transfer the pleasure, in idea, to that object, so that they form an integral whole. But then a new feeling must be excited by that whole in order to move you.
- ↑ I do not mean that it can not be theoretically apprehended, and so transformed by the observing intellect, while at the same time and none the less as feeling it moves us practically. What I mean is that, so far as transformed, it is destroyed. The ideal representation of the feeling, so long as only theoretical, may coexist side by side with the practical feeling; but that representation as practical, i.e. as an idea which generates new practical feeling, is ipso facto the destruction of the old feeling as such.
