CHAPTER VIII

CONCLUSION

THE complex system studied in this book is the last addition we have to make to that conception of character which it has been one of the principal aims of our work gradually to unfold. Indeed it may seem to many that Desire is the most important of all the systems and forces of character; and that if we could understand the laws of the origin, growth, and decline of its different varieties, we should also understand the laws of the origin, growth, and decline of different varieties of character. But notwithstanding the great part which our desires play in making our characters what they are known to be, yet they are never independent forces: they spring originally from our primary emotions and impulses, and have a second and most prolific source in our sentiments.

The old writers who classed Desire with the emotions overlooked perhaps one principal difference between it and them. Desire is an abstraction; however much it predominates in consciousness, and appears there as an independent force, it presupposes and always belongs to some other system from which it has sprung, and from which it derives its determinate end. However charged with emotion, however peculiar desire may be, we cannot, therefore, class it with the emotions.

Anger, fear, disgust, and curiosity have determinate ends. We can describe in general terms what they are, and how distinguished from one another. Desire has no determinate end; it only has some end. It is abstracted from something

else, and, by being treated in our thought independently, it has lost determinate character. If we want to know what the end of desire may be, we must say what the desire is, or to what it belongs. It may belong to anger or fear, or to any other primary emotion. If anger does not explode at once, if something arrests and delays it, we become aware of its end, and desire this end. If fear does not at once secure our safety, we become aware of our danger, and desire to escape from it. The impulse of this desire, with all the prospective emotions to which it may give rise, is none other than that of the anger or the fear; to that it belongs, and the end of the emotion alone gives it determinate character, and becomes its end. Desire is not an independent system.

We may then enunciate this law: (144) Every emotion, when its end is obstructed, tends to develop its impulse into desire, and so to give rise to the prospective emotions: the system of every emotion potentially contains desire with its prospective emotions.

This, then, is one way in which desires arise; and as desires may spring from the lesser systems of the emotions, so they may also spring from the greater systems of the sentiments. There are many desires that arise only because there is a preformed sentiment of love or hate. If a man loves knowledge he desires to possess and increase it; if a man loves his friend, he desires to see him frequently, and desires his happiness and welfare. All kinds of love are a perennial source of desires, because their ends are never fully satisfied.

It is then a complete mistake to represent desire as an independent force, and to suppose that it can be co-ordinated either with the emotions or with the sentiments. We cannot take desire as the base of a scientific study of character. We cannot satisfactorily interpret character as a collection of desires; because, though we may conceive of them as having ends, we do not know what are the forces behind them which have given them these ends, and to which they alone belong. Yet there are some desires so important that they seem to furnish the chief characteristics of a man, as the desire of fame, of power, or of wealth. For the sentiments are continually eliciting desires, and have two kinds of them: the one

temporary, and springing from their particular emotions, as the desire to console a friend in sorrow or to congratulate him in success, the other, relatively fixed and permanent, because determined by the system acting as a whole,—as the desire of a man to pursue his friend's interest and happiness. Thus loving wealth and power, and never having enough of them or finding them necessary for many other things that we love, we spend our lives so much in desiring them.

It is, then, not through a study of the dependent systems of desire but through those of the emotions and sentiments that we should approach the problems of the science of character. We have conceived of character as constituted of these principal forces, and to them we have referred all its other constituents. For character, as ordinarily conceived, is supposed to consist of a number of isolated qualities, as 'independence,'' servility,'' generosity,'' meanness,' 'gentleness,' harshness,' 'candour,' 'reserve,'' deceitfulness,' and innumerable others, popularly regarded in most cases as either good' or 'bad,' and therefore leading to the summary conception of character as 'good' or 'bad.' These qualities, though there be an innate bias to one or other of them in individual persons, are, like our desires, not independent tendencies; and we have to trace them to those systems to which they belong, and with which they are inherited or acquired. If we treat them independently we can only distinguish, define, and classify them as M. Paulhan has so well done.1 We do not understand why they appear in some men and not in others, nor how they develop and decay.

Thus we are gradually led up to a conception of character in which the first confusion of its diverse kinds of constituents is reduced to order, and we are presented with an interplay of systems, as complex as their ends require them to be; and the understanding of their laws of their growth, constitution, decay, and interaction becomes our principal problem. And as these laws are subject to conditions, of which at first we can only discern the most conspicuous, while many others remain undiscovered, we have to throw them into provisional forms, in which they both serve

1' Les Caractères.'

us as working hypotheses, and lead to their own correction and improvement. That which has chiefly hindered the development of this important and dynamical science of human nature has been the perplexity and confusion into which the mind is thrown when we attempt to trace the intricacies of human character without a map or plan of its various departments to guide us.