I have so far confined myself to the motives operating upon the consciousness of adult human beings at an advanced stage of development. I shall hereafter have to consider how far the facts of Evolution can throw any light upon our ethical ideas; and it is of the last importance to keep questions of psychological fact distinct from questions of psychological origin. The starting-point of any enquiry into the origin or history or explanation of our ideas, desires, motives or any other facts of consciousness must be a clear comprehension of what these facts are now in that developed human consciousness which alone is accessible to direct observation. Into questions of origin and history, therefore, I do not propose to enter now in any detail. But it is hardly possible to deal effectively with the theory of psychological Hedonism without noticing that its plausibility lies for many minds in a certain confusion between the question of origin and the question of actual present fact.(Bk. 1 Ch. 2 § 2 ¶ 1)

It is constantly assumed as a sort of axiom that Altruism must have in some way evolved out of Egoism; and this assumption often carries with it the further implication that in some sense Altruism is thereby shown to be Egoism after all, only more or less disguised. It is not surprising that pre-evolutionary individualists like John Stuart Mill should have supposed that primitive men and the lower animals were pure Egoists. But it is amazing to discover the same delusion more or less underlying the treatment of this subject by the very writer who, whatever may be thought of his system as a whole, has at least the merit of having been the first among Darwin's disciples to suspect that Darwinian ideas might throw important light upon many psychological and sociological phenomena^[18]. If there is one thing which the Darwinian doctrine of Evolution has emphasized in the psychological region, it is the existence in animals and in primitive men of tendencies, impulses, instincts, of whose self-preserving or race-preserving efficacy they themselves are quite unconscious. We have hitherto sought our illustrations of impulses that are not mere desires of pleasure in desires which might be considered as, in a sense, above the moral or at least above the intellectual level of pleasure-seeking. It is quite equally certain that there are in animals, in primitive men, and in infants at an advanced stage of social development (to say nothing of adults) impulses that are below that level^[19]. The human or other infant does not suck because experience has convinced it that sucking is a source of pleasure. It does not first suck by accident, and then repeat the action because it has found sucking pleasant, though this last discovery will no doubt aid in inducing it to suck in the right place. It sucks simply because it has an impulse to suck. The Physiologist may know why it sucks; but the child does not. The young bird does not tap the inside of its shell because it has calculated that the breaking of that shell is a condition precedent to the enjoyment of wider pleasures than are possible to it in the limited sphere of its early experiences; it taps for no other reason than that it has the impulse to tap. The beaver that has been in the habit of collecting sticks to build its habitation will go on collecting sticks when its house is ready built for it. The young elephant does not attack the aggressor because experience has convinced it that that is the best way of avoiding aggression, and the painful consequences of aggression, in the future; it attacks because it is angry. No doubt in all these cases the gratification of the impulse does in fact give pleasure, or at least the resistance to the impulse would be found painful. And the experienced pleasure or relief from pain undoubtedly stimulates the animal to the continued performance of the acts. Moreover, in some cases the impulses which are now blind and unreflecting may have originally in some remote ancestor been purposeful; but the fact remains that the actual stimulus to the present act is not a mere anticipation of pleasure: the pleasure only comes because there is a pre-existing impulse. Striving of some kind or other is as primitive a factor in all consciousness as feeling^[20]. It is quite true that normally not only is the satisfaction of the impulse itself a pleasure, but the instincts of an animal tend for the most part to prompt actions which are pleasurable on the whole. an instinct which brought immediate pain would tend to disappear also. But these tendencies are by no means always realized, and require to be stated with many qualifications. The moth would no doubt find it painful to resist the impulse which draws it to the candle; but still it is probable that on the whole it does not find it pleasant to be burned alive. The instinct does not tend to promote survival, and yet the moth survives.(Bk. 1 Ch. 2 § 2 ¶ 2)

Many of the instincts or impulses of animals are not self-preserving but race-preserving, and these are often sources of immediate pain and danger to the animal itself. The most obvious instance is the maternal instinct which often leads an animal to brave obvious pain or danger for the sake of its young. And among the higher and more gregarious animals there are often found not merely the blind impulses of anger and aggression which do actually preserve individual and race alike, but instincts which lead them to face easily avoidable perils and pains in defence of the herd. How far these instincts are due to lapsed intelligence, how far to natural selection, how far to direct adaptation, how far they may require the hypothesis of a final causality which resists further physiological explanation, are questions with which we are not now concerned. The only point that has here to be emphasized is that the conscious actions of infants or animals are as little explicable by the theory of psychological Hedonism as those of the hero or the saint. The impulses are not desires for a particular imagined pleasure, still less for a greatest possible quantum of pleasure upon the whole. This last aim would imply a power of reflection and abstraction wholly beyond what we have any reason to believe to be possible in an animal or even a not very primitive man. The theory of psychological Hedonism is therefore not entitled to any advantage which it might derive from presenting us with a true account of the historical origin of our present human experience. Altruism was not developed out of Egoism; though, if it were, that would not disprove the existence of Altruism now. Men and animals have always had both race-preserving and self-preserving instincts. Altruism in the developed human beings is evolved out of social and race-preserving instincts: Egoism out of self-preserving instincts. Both in their human form involve an intellectual development of which the lower animals are incapable.(Bk. 1 Ch. 2 § 2 ¶ 3)

The question may be raised whether these instincts or impulses which we have distinguished from disinterested desires in the stricter sense do not exist even in developed humanity? They certainly exist in the human infant: do they in the adult man? The answer seems to be that these impulses do certainly exist. It is perhaps better not to follow Bishop Butler in classing hunger with such disinterested desires as Benevolence or even Vengeance^[21]. Hunger is neither a desire for the pleasure of eating, nor (in its less acute forms) a desire to avoid the pains of inanition: but it is not quite the same thing as a disinterested desire of food for food's sake. It is simply an impulse to eat. But then the human being has a power which the animal has not, or a greater power than the animal possesses, of reflecting on these impulses of his, and presenting their satisfaction to himself as an object of thought and of encouraging them or resisting them accordingly. So long as the impulse is a physically irresistible impulse, as when a man closes his eyes or ducks his head to avoid an unexpected missile, that is mere reflex action; that is to say, the act is not in the moral sense of the word an act at all. The impulse is not, properly speaking, a motive. But in so far as the impulse can be inhibited, in so far as the impulse is reflected on and its object deliberately conceived by the understanding and adopted by the will, the mere instinct or impulse passes into what we ordinarily call a desire, and (in so far as the desire is not merely a desire for the imagined pleasure of satisfaction) a disinterested desire. And therefore from an ethical point of view the distinction between appetites and instinctive desires or desires of objects becomes of comparatively little importance--of comparatively little importance, though it may for some purpose be important to remember that an action prompted by impulse or appetite or instinct, even where not actually involuntary, may be far less voluntary than one which flows from the conscious and deliberate desire for an object clearly presented to the mind. There are no hard and fast lines to be drawn in this matter. In the developing race and in the growing child reflex action passes by imperceptible gradations into instinctive action, and instinct into voluntary action motivated by desire. so in the adult human individual there is every stage between the purely reflex action and the fully premeditated and deliberate act; but it would seem that, though there are instincts, there are here no purely instinctive acts in the strict sense of the word except those which are wholly involuntary. The instinct which has been reflected on and has not been inhibited, may be treated as a desire--for pleasure or some other object, as the case may be, and the resulting act is no longer in the strict sense of the word merely instinctive.(Bk. 1 Ch. 2 § 2 ¶ 4)