LECTURE XXIV. ON THE DESIRES. DR. REID, in his essay upon the Active Powers, remarks of our desires, that they have, all of them, things, not persons, for their object. They neither imply any good nor ill affection towards any person, nor even toward ourselves. They can not, therefore, with propriety be called either selfish or social. But there are various principles of actions in men, which have persons for their immediate objects, and imply, in their very nature, our being well or ill affected to some person, or at least to some animated being. "Such principles," says Dr. Reid, "I call by the general name of affections; whether they dispose us to do good or hurt to others." This method, by which passions are referred to persons, and desires to things, has been also adopted by Mr. Dugald Stewart, in his "Outlines of Moral Philosophy," without any alteration. But if desire concern only things, why is the love of esteem classed among the desires? for that, surely, respects persons; and why are joy and grief classed among the passions without any limitation? for grief may be occasioned by the loss of £20,000., as by the loss of an aunt or a cousin. There is a grief occasioned by persons, and a grief occasioned by things; but both Dr. Reid and Mr. Stewart would not scruple to call grief-let its cause be what it would -by the name of passion. The first object, surely, in all investigations of this nature, is to ascertain in what sense such words are actually used: and then, after showing that such uses are unsatisfactory or vague, to propose that deviation from the established meaning, which, being the most useful, is the least violent. In chemistry, mineralogy, or any science remote from common life, the popular language which respects them, is commonly not only useless, but it conduces to error; and is better kept out of view: but in the language of feeling, words are of great importance, because every man feels they are the repositories of human judgments, upon a subject on which all men are, more or less, calculated to judge. It will appear, I believe, that, in all this business of feeling, there are three things which have particularly attracted our notice :-the violent perturbation or derangement the mind suffers; the wish to do something, or obtain something, with which that perturbation is accompanied; and the cause from which that perturbation is derived. "Achilles heard: with grief and rage opprest, Force through the Greeks, and pierce their haughty lord; And calm the rising tempest of the soul." In this, and in every other picture of extreme passion, it is to the perturbation itself, its causes, and its consequences, that we direct our inquiry. Whenever the emotion proceeds from a bodily cause, and is accompanied with a wish to act, or to obtain, we give to that emotion the name of appetite ;-as in the instance of hunger and thirst. Here the mind is thrown into a state of emotion, the body is the cause of that emotion; and it is accompanied by a wish to obtain, and to act. No one would now call hunger and thirst, passions; or imagine that the celebrated authoress of the Plays on the Passions, is bound, in the prosecution of her task, to bring forward a hero who has not eaten any thing for fortyeight hours, and to conclude such a play with the catastrophe of a dinner or a supper. We say a desire for food, as well as an appetite for food; but in speaking of the desires, and the appetites, we should hardly class together the desire of knowledge, and the desire of drink. It seems generally agreed, where any kind of precision is required, to call the bodily emotions by the name of appetites; and the mental ones, by those of passion or desire. When the cause, then, of the emotion is the body,and when it is accompanied with an active tendency, it is called appetite; when it is not, it receives simply the name of bodily pain or pleasure. We may say metaphorically, that gout, rheumatism, and lumbago, are the unpleasant passions of the body; that warmth and repletion are its agreeable passions. Whenever we see any emotion of the mind which has not the body for its cause, we call it desire, if it lead to action ;-passion, if it do not. No one calls grief and joy, hope and fear, by the name of desire. To suffer from the desire of grief, is nonsense; to suffer from the passion of grief, is the customary phrase. They are not called desires, because they are not the immediate causes of action. We say the desire of knowledge, the desire of esteem, the desire of power, because they are emotions leading immediately to action. Some emotions we call indiscriminately by the name of passion or desire: but this exactly confirms what I say; for when we speak of the passion of revenge, we are more particularly thinking of the perturbation the mind endures; when we speak of revenge as a desire, we have in mind the tendency to action which it occasions: therefore, if I am right, the idea of referring desires to things, and passions to persons, is quite unfounded; and this will turn out to be somewhere near their meaning. Appetites are emotions of mind, proceeding from a bodily cause, and leading immediately to action: there are also animal pains and pleasures, which are emotions of the mind proceeding from a bodily cause, and not leading immediately to action.-Passions are emotions of the mind, not proceeding from a bodily cause, and not leading immediately to action.-Desires are emotions of the mind not proceeding from a bodily cause, and leading to action. And lastly, whenever we use the two words, desire and passion, for the same affection of mind, it is because in the one, we consider what the mind endures P from the emotion; in the other, how it is impelled to act by the emotion. I am aware it would be very curious, as well as very useful, here to consider how far the same divisions and distinctions obtain in other languages, which are adopted in our own it would not be very difficult to do it, but it would necessarily lead to long verbal discussions, which might be very agreeable to two or three persons, and very tiresome to every one beside. I have already classed those emotions of the neutral class, which are called either desires or passions, among the latter; because I found them so classed, and because it did not then occur to me, what was the distinguishing circumstance between the passions and desires. The desires, of which I shall treat at present, are, the desire of knowledge, the desire of esteem, the desire of power, the desire of possession, and the desire of activity: not that these are the only desires which possess the mind, but that almost all the lesser motives are immediately resolvable into them. Let every man consider the innumerable principles of action by which he is every day impelled, and he will very soon discover that these desires are the origin of them all. You take a walk; that is, you are under the influence of that principle of nature, which makes continued rest painful to you; or you go to call upon some one, who will make you more rich, or more powerful; or you go to a tailor, who will make you more respectable in your appearance. These great operating principles are broken down into innumerable divisions and subdivisions; but there are very few of our actions which can not be traced to their source. The ten thousand minute things which we all perform every day, all proceed, directly or indirectly, from the great principles which I have enumerated. Look at the bustle of Bond street; drive from thence to the Royal Exchange; observe the infinite variety of occupations, movements, and agitations, as you go along: nothing can appear more intricate,-more impossible to be reduced to any thing like rule or system; and yet a very few elements put all this mass of human beings into action. If a messenger from heaven were on a sud den to annihilate the love of power, the love of wealth, and the love of esteem, in the human heart; in half an hour's time the streets would be as empty, and as silent, as they are in the middle of the night. I take it to be a consequence of civilization, that all the feelings of mind which proceed from the body excite little sympathy, in comparison with those which have not a bodily origin. The loss of a leg and an arm is a dreadful misfortune; but the slightest disgrace would be considered as a much greater. To be laid up seven months in the gout every year is a piteous state of existence; to lose a brother or a sister is a state of existence, in common estimation, still more miserable. The slightest pang of jealousy, or wounded pride, may be brought upon the stage; but the most intense pain of body, introduced into a play, would excite laughter rather than compassion. Who would endure a tragedy, where the whole distress turned upon a fit of the palsy, or a smart rheumatic fever? Nothing could be more exquisitely ridiculous! The fact is, as a nation advances in the useful arts, all bodily evils are so much mitigated, and guarded against, that they cease to excite that sympathy which they formerly did, because they are less generally felt. How ridiculous, as I before remarked, a play would be, of which a hungry man were the hero! Why ?-because we never suffer from extreme hunger, and have very little sympathy for it; there is hardly any such thing known in civilized society: the author himself would, probably, be the only man in the whole playhouse, who had ever seriously felt the want of a dinner. But if a nation of savages were to see such a drama acted, they would see no ridicule in it at all; because starving to death is, among them, no uncommon thing: they are advanced such a little way in civilization, that to fill their stomachs, is the great and important object of life: and I have no doubt, that to an Indian audience, the loss of a piece of venison might be the basis of a tragedy which would fill every eye with tears; but, on the contrary, they might be very likely to laugh, to hear a man complain of his wounded honor, if it turned out that he had ten days' provision beforehand in his cabin. In the |