We saw above that when the satisfaction of appetite was reflected on, when the self was identified with the pleasant negation of particular sensuous objects, and that as an idea was made an end, then we had lust, with its infinite process and general unsatisfiedness. We have now to see how different it all is, when the self is made one with ideas of a different sort.
The child, as we saw, finds pleasure in accordance with the superior, in the pursuits which are approved of by him; and the thought of these activities, which are called good,[1] is pleasant and ideally affirms his will. They are ends in themselves; they are not reached by the excitement of appetite towards this or that perishing thing of sense; they are not merely something to be enjoyed, they are something to be done. They have a content other than the feeling of the subject, an objective content; and that objective content is by act carried out into the external world. It can be seen and possessed there; or, if invisible, yet exists for thought in its results, or at least in the recognition of others. The child has done something; and what he has done he still in some shape or other has, if it be only in credit; he possesses an objective issue of his will, and in that not only did realize himself, but does perpetually have himself realized. The self, felt permanent and identical within him, finds its counterpart in the world which is not merely itself; it has a permanent and identical expression, and, if it think of itself, it has something to think of, a solid existing and real content, not the mere memory of the perished and unreal. Hence there is perpetual satisfaction, not because desire ceases, but because here desire is pleasant both in itself and its results. It is necessary, of course, that the yet to be done, the something more or the something new, should be presented as ideal assertion against relative non-assertion. But, in the first place, the privation is merely relative; the desire is not, as in lust, the contradiction between fulness and absolute emptiness (in lust we say, ‘if I do not get this now, what matters all that I have got before? for now it is nothing’)—but we start from the habitual complacency in our known realization, and, if
- ↑ We shall come upon what may be called bad interests later on in our account of the bad self.
