our impulses is the mere thinking of reason to the contrary it is their bare presence to the mind. which gives the veto, and makes acts, otherwise seductive, impossible to perform. If we could only forget our scruples, what exultant energy we should for a while display."

(2) Another point. If pleasure or pain, or the expectation of pleasure or pain, is what prompts all action, how shall we explain the first performance of so-called instinctive acts? Men as well as animals perform many acts instinctively, without knowing beforehand whether the results will be pleasurable or painful. The newly hatched chick sees the grain of corn, and straightway makes the movements necessary to pick it up, without any thought of pleasure. Similarly the sight of the infant arouses the love of the young mother, and impels her to care for it. And the lover of truth feels a craving to unravel the mysteries of the universe, regardless of whether his longings will bring him pleasure or pain. In cases like these there is present in consciousness a more or less distinct idea and a tendency toward it, a feeling of pressure or impulsion toward it. The explosion of the impulse will be followed by pleasure, though the agent may know nothing of this result until it has happened. The impulse or desire for the act here exists prior to the act itself and the pleasure accompanying or following it.

If the hedonistic theory is correct, then all these acts must be prompted by pleasure or the expecta

It

tion of pleasure, or by pain or the fear of pain. will not do to say that such acts are at first purely reflex, in the sense that they follow mechanically as the consequence of the stimulation of some nerve centre from within or without, and that the pleasure experienced after the first mechanical movement becomes the future motor cue. For if they have occurred originally without the intervention of a pleasurable motive, why should the pleasure be such an indispensable condition thereafter? Nor will it do to say that pleasure, though not now the motive, was the original motive, and that such acts are inheritances of the past. Such an explanation is a mere begging of the question; it pushes the problem farther back into the field of the unknown, and then assumes the very thing to be proved. Besides, if acts can be performed at the present time without being prompted by pleasure, why could they not have been performed in a similar way before?

(3) Again, if pleasure, or the idea of pleasure, is the sole motive to action, how shall we explain the fact that some pleasures are preferred to others? Why do many men prefer the pleasures of the intellect to the pleasures of sense? Shall we say with Bentham that the so-called higher pleasures are more intense than the others? But many psychologists hold that the reverse is true.1 And if the intensity of the pleasure is not what gives it its motive force, what is it? The peculiar quality of 1 See Ladd, Psychology, p. 195.

the pleasure? (Mill.) In that case the theory abandons its original position that pleasure is the sole motive to action, and substitutes for it the view that a certain kind of pleasure causes us to act, a fact which must be explained.

Moreover, how did the race emerge from savagery, how did it come to prefer ideal pleasures? Who told our ancestors of the pleasures resulting from the pursuit of higher aims before they had tasted them? Were they not bound to think first, before they discovered that thinking was pleasurable?

(4) It seems that there can be conscious action which is not prompted by pleasure or the anticipation of it. Men think and plan and act, they struggle for fame and recognition in this world and in the next, they sacrifice themselves for ideals, much in the same manner in which children play and birds sing because it is their nature to do what they do, because they desire or will to do it, not because it gives them pleasure. Giordano Bruno did not die at the stake for the pleasure of the thing, nor did Socrates drink the poisoned hemlock for the sake of happiness beyond the grave. Aristotle and Copernicus, Newton and Darwin, did not give up their lives to the study of nature in order to realize pleasure and avoid pain. They did what they did because they could not help themselves. "It is a calumny to say," so Carlyle declares, "that men are roused to heroic actions by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense sugar-plums of any kind in this world

or the next. In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. The poor swearing soldier hired to be shot has his 'honor of a soldier,' different from drill, regulations, and the shilling a day. It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations." 1

(5) It is true that the realization of our desires and purposes is accompanied or followed by a temporary feeling of relief or satisfaction or pleasure. But this does not prove that the feeling, or the expectation of it, was the cause of the result. If I should make up my mind to jump out of the window, I should not be satisfied until I had accomplished the task. The realization of my desire would bring me relief, but the latter would not necessarily be the cause of the act. The tension in my brain or the energy in the cells would be discharged into my muscles, and a feeling of pleasure would ensue. But I could not say that it was the expectation of this result that made me jump.

1 Hero-Worship, p. 237 (ed. 1858). Quoted by Lecky, European Morals, Vol. I, p. 57.

My pleasures depend upon my impulses and desires, my desires do not depend upon my pleasures. To assume that pleasure is the cause of an act because it follows the act, is a fallacy of the post hoc ergo propter hoc kind. As Höffding says: "Because the end or the object of the impulse is something that excites, or seems to excite, pleasure, it need not necessarily be the feeling of pleasure itself. The impulse is essentially determined by an idea, is a striving after the content of this idea. In hunger, e.g., the impulse has reference to the food, not to the feeling of pleasure in its consumption. "The sympathetic impulses, e.g., the impulse to mitigate the sorrows or to promote the welfare of others, are guided by the idea of the improved condition of others, depicted more or less in the imagination, as also by that of the pleasure they feel in their improved condition, — but it is not in the least necessary for the idea of the pleasure afforded to us by the sight of their improved condition to make itself felt." 2

"1

8. Present Pleasure - Pain as the Motive. Sometimes the theory is interpreted in the second sense referred to above.3 That is, all action. is prompted by pleasure or pain, not by the idea or expectation of it. It is only because the idea of

1 Psychology, English translation, p. 323. See Bain's answer to this argument, Emotions and the Will, "The Will," chap. viii, § 7.

2 See also Steinthal, Ethik, Part III, pp. 312-382; II, pp. 227, 348. 8 § 6.