Desire is the experience of pleasure. When any pleasure has once been tasted, the recollection is afterwards a motive to regain it. The infant has no craving but for the breast; desire comes in with new pleasures. It is from enjoying the actual, that we come to desire the pleasures of sound, of spectacle, and of all the higher emotions. Sexuality is founded on an appetite, but the other pleasing emotions are brought, by a course of experience, to the longing pitch. Intense as is the feeling of maternity, no animal or human being preconceives it. The emotions of wonder, of complacency, of ambition, of revenge, of curiosity, of fine art, must be gratified in order to be evoked as permanent longings. Experience is necessary to temptation in this class of delights. A being solitary from birth would have no craving for society.

Even as regards Appetite, experience gives a definite aim to the longings, directing them upon the objects known as the means of their gratification. We crave for certain things that have always satisfied hunger, and for a known place suited to repose. This easy transition, effected by association, misled Butler into supposing that our appetites are not selfish; they do not go direct to the removal of pain and the bestowal of pleasure, but centre in a number of special objects.

A higher complication arises when we contemplate the appearances of enjoyment in others, and are led to crave for participation. We must still have a basis of personal knowledge; but when out of a very narrow experience of the good things of life, we venture to conceive the happiness of the children of fortune, our estimate is likely to be erroneous, and to be biassed by the feelings that control the imagination. How this bias works, is explained by the analysis of the ideal or imaginative faculty (Book II., chap. iv., § 15).

6. As all our pleasures and pains have the volitional property, that is, incite to action, so they all give birth to desire; from which circumstance, some feelings carry the fact of Desire in their names. Such are Avarice, Ambition, Curiosity.

This has very generally led to the including of Desire, as a phenomenon, in the classification of the feelings. In every desire, there is a pleasure or pain, but the fact itself is properly an aspect of volition or the Will.

7. As in actual volition, so in Desire, we may have the disturbing effect of the Fixed Idea.

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Nothing is more common than a persistent idea giving origin to the conflicts, and the day dreams, and all the outgoings of Desire. The examples already given of the fixed idea in the motives of the will, have their prolongation and expansion in ideal longings, when pursuit is impossible. Such are the day-dreams of wealth, ambition, affection, future happiness.

8. Desire is incorrectly represented as a constant and necessary prelude of volition.

Like Deliberation and Resolution, the state of Desire has now been shown to be a transformation of the will proper, undergone in circumstances where the act does not immediately follow the motive. There remains a farther example of the same peculiarity, forming the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER VIII.

BELIEF.

1. THE mental state termed BELIEF, while involving the Intellect and the Feelings, is, in its essential import, related to Activity, or the Will.

In believing that the sun will rise to-morrow, that next winter will be cold, that alcohol stimulates, that such a one is to be trusted, that Turkey is ill-governed, that free trade increases the wealth of nations, that human life is full of vicissitudes,—in what state of mind are we? a state purely intellectual, or intellectual and something besides? In all these affirmations there is an intellectual conception, but so there is in many things that we do not believe. We may understand the meaning of a proposition, we may conceive it with the utmost vividness, and yet not believe it. We may have an exact intellectual comprehension of the statement that the moon is only one hundred miles distant from the earth; but without any accompanying belief.

It is next to be seen, if a feeling, or emotion, added to the intellectual conception, will amount to the believing state. Suppose us to conceive and contemplate the approaching sum

mer as beautiful and genial beyond all the summers of the century, we should have much pleasure in this contemplation, but the pleasure (although, as will be seen, a predisposing cause) does not constitute the belief. There is, thus, nothing either in Intellect or in Feeling, to impart the essence of Belief.

In the practice of every day life, we are accustomed to test men's belief by action, 'faith by works.' If a politician declares free trade to be good, and yet will not allow it to be acted on (there being no extraneous barriers in the way), people say he does not believe his own assertion. A general affirming that he was stronger and better entrenched than the enemy, and yet acting as if he were weaker, would be held as believing not what he affirmed, but what he acted on. A capitalist that withdraws his money from foreign governments, and invests it at a smaller interest in the English funds, is treated as having lost faith or confidence in the stability of the foreign powers. Any one pretending to believe in a future life of rewards and punishments, and acting precisely as if there were no such life, is justly set down as destitute of belief in the doctrine.

2. The relation of Belief to Activity is expressed by saying, that what we believe we act upon.

The instances above given, point to this and to no other conclusion. The difference between mere conceiving or imagining, with or without strong feeling, and belief, is acting, or being prepared to act, when the occasion arises. The belief that a sovereign is worth twenty shillings, is shown by the readiness to take the sovereign in exchange for the shillings; the belief that a sovereign is light is shown by refusing to take it as the equivalent of twenty shillings.

The definition will be best elucidated by the apparent exceptions.

(1) We often have a genuine belief, and yet do not act upon it. One may have the conviction strongly that abstinence from stimulants would favour health and happiness, and yet go on taking stimulants. And there are many parallels in the conduct of human beings. The case, however, is no real exception. Belief is a motive, or an inducement to act, but it may be overpowered by a stronger motive—a present pleasure, or relief from a present pain. We are inclined to act where we believe, but not always with an omnipotent strength of impulse. Belief is an active state, with different degrees of force; it is said to be strong or to be weak. It is

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strong when it carries us against a powerful counter impulse, weak when overpowered by an impulse not strong. Yet if it ever induces us to act at all, if it vanquishes the smallest resistance, it is belief. The believer in a future life may do very little in consequence of that belief; he may never act in the face of a strong opposition; but if he does anything at all that he would not otherwise do, if he incurs the smallest present sacrifice, he is admitted to have a real, though feeble, belief.

(2) The second apparent exception is furnished by the cases where we believe things that we never can have any occasion to act upon. Some philosophers of the present day believe that the sun is radiating away his heat, and will in some inconceivably long period cool down far below zero of Fahrenheit. Any fact more completely out of the active sphere of those philosophers could not be suggested to the human mind. It is the same with the alleged past history of the universe, sidereal and geological. An astronomer has many decided convictions in connexion with the remote nebulæ of the firmament. Even the long past events of human history, the exploits of Epaminondas, and the invasion of Britain by the Romans, are beyond our sphere of action, and are yet believed by us. And as regards the still existing arrangements of things, many men that will never cross the Sahara desert, believe what is told of its surface, of its burning days and chilling nights.

It is not hard to trace a reference to action in every one of these beliefs. Take the last-named first. When we believe the testimony of travellers as to the Sahara, we view that testimony as the same in kind with what we are accustomed to act upon. A traveller in Africa has also passed through France, and has perhaps told us many things respecting that country, and we have acted on his information. He has also told us of Sahara, and we have fallen into the same mental attitude in this case, although we may not have the same occasion to act it out. We express the attitude by saying, that if we went to Africa, we would do certain things in consequence of the information.

As regards the past, we believe history in two ways. The first use is analogous to what has been stated, namely, when we put the testimony to historical events on the same footing as the testimony that we now act upon. Another way, is when we form theories or doctrines of human affairs, reposing in part on those past events, and carry these doctrines into operation in our present practice.

The belief in sidereal phenomena immeasurably remote in space and in time, is a recognition of the scientific method employed upon these phenomena. The navigator sails the seas upon the faith of observations of the same nature as those applied to the distant stars and nebulæ. If an astronomer propounded doctrines as to the nebulæ, founded upon observations of a kind that would not be trusted in navigation or in the prediction of eclipses, we should be in a perceptibly different state of mind respecting such doctrines, and that state of mind is not improperly styled disbelief.

(3) In many notorious instances our belief is determined by the strength of our feelings, which may be alleged as a proof that it is grounded on the emotional part of our nature. The fact is admitted, but not the inference. It will be afterwards seen in what ways the feelings operate upon the belief, without themselves constituting the state of believing.

(4) Very frequently, belief is engendered by a purely intellectual process. Thus, when a proposition in geometry is first propounded to us, we may understand its purport without believing it; but, by going through a chain of reasoning or demonstration, an operation wholly of the intellect, we pass into a state of entire conviction. So with the thousands of cases where we are led into belief by mere argument, proof, or intellectual enlightenment; in all which, there is the appearance of an intellectual origin of belief.

The same conclusion is suggested by another set of facts, namely, our believing from the testimony of our senses, or personal experience; for perception by the senses is admitted to be a function of the intellect. It is by such an operation that we believe in gravity, in the connexion of sunrise with light and heat, and so on.

So, when we receive and adjudicate on the testimony of others, we are performing a function strictly intellectual.

Led seemingly by such facts as these, metaphysicians have been almost, if not altogether, unanimous in enrolling Belief among the intellectual powers. Nevertheless, it may be affirmed, that intellect alone will not constitute Belief, any more than it will constitute Volition. The reasonings of the Geometer do not create the state of belief, they merely bring affirmations under an already-formed belief, the belief in the axioms of the science. Unless that belief can be shown to be an intellectual product, the faith in demonstrative truth is not based in intellect. The precise function of our intelligence in believing will be shown in what follows.