Now, any truth that there is in Butler’s view amounts to this:—­In our Appetites we are not thinking every instant of subduing pain and attaining pleasure; we are ultimately moved by these feelings; but, having once seen that the medium of their gratification is a certain material object (food), we direct our whole aim to procuring that.  The hungry wolf ceases to think of his pains of hunger when he is in sight of a sheep; but for these pains he would have paid no heed to the sheep; yet when the sheep has to be caught, the hunger is submerged for the time; the only relevant course, even on its account, is to give the whole mind and body to the chase of the sheep.  Butler calls this indifferent or disinterested pursuit; and as much as says, that the wolf is not self-seeking, but sheep-seeking, in its chase.  Now, it is quite true that if the wolf could give no place in its mind for anything but its hungry pains, it would be in a bad way.  It is wiser than that; it knows the remedy; it is prepared to dismiss the pains from its thoughts, in favour of a concentrated attention upon the distant flock.  This proves nothing as to its unselfishness; nor does it prove that Appetite is a different thing from self-seeking or self-love.

[APPETITE DECLARED UNSELFISH.]

There may be disinterested motives in our constitution; but Appetite is not in any sense one of these.  We may have instincts answering to the traditional phrase used in defining instinct, “a blind propensity” to act, without aiming at anything in particular, and without any expectation of pleasure or benefit.  Such instincts would conform to Butler’s notion of appetite:  they would be entirely out of the course of self-love or self-seeking of any sort.  Whether the nest-building activity of birds, and the constructiveness of ants, bees, and beavers, comply with this condition, I do not undertake to say.  There is one process better known to ourselves, not exactly an instinct, but probably a mixture of instinct and acquirement—­I mean the process of Imitation—­which works very much upon this model.  Although coming under the control of the Will, yet in its own proper character it operates blindly, or without purpose; neither courting pleasure, nor chasing pain.  In like manner, Sympathy, in its most characteristic form, proceeds without any distinct aim of pleasure to ourselves.

Nothing of this can be affirmed of the Appetites.  In them, nature places us, as Bentham says, under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.  An appetite would cease to move us, if its painful and pleasurable accompaniments were done away with.  It matters not that we remit our attention, at times, to the pain or the pleasure; these are always in the background; and the strength of the appetite is their strength.

So far as concerns Butler’s example of the Appetites, there is no case for the view that to obtain happiness we must avoid aiming at it directly.  If we do not aim at the pleasure in its own subjective character, we aim at the thing that immediately brings the pleasure; which is, for all practical purposes, to aim at the pleasure.