Before leaving the subject of pleasure I think it desirable to add a further explanation. It is possible to reject the hedonistic Psychology without admitting the existence of disinterested desires in the strictest sense of the word. Until recently the existence of disinterested desires was usually denied (among modern Philosophers) only by Hedonists. The late Professor Green agreed with Professor Sidgwick in accepting unreservedly Butler's quite explicit doctrine on this head. At the same time we find in Professor Green's writings, side by side with this view, another which seems to be scarcely consistent with it. He commits himself at times to the doctrine that in every action self-satisfaction is sought^[36]. His theory of the timeless self no doubt makes it difficult to say in what relation this doctrine of self-satisfaction is supposed to stand to the belief in disinterested desires. Desires are certainly in time, and the object of desire must be conceived of as future. It is, therefore, not easy to see how the satisfaction of a self which is not in time can be made into a motive for conduct, or how we can at a definite moment of time introduce a change into that which is timeless. Here (as so often with theories of this kind) it is difficult not to suspect some confusion between the permanent and the timeless. But, waiving that difficulty, I can only understand the idea of aiming at self-satisfaction to mean that my motive is a certain future state of my own consciousness. If I am always aiming at a future state of my own consciousness, I cannot be disinterestedly pursuing the advancement of learning or the good of my neighbour. In that case I should care about my neighbour's good merely as a means to my own satisfaction. The two doctrines are antagonistic and inconsistent. Recent writers of Professor Green's School appear to have recognized the fact, and have explicitly adopted the doctrine of self-satisfaction. They are Egoists without being Hedonists. They admit that every action is properly speaking interested, though my interest is not equivalent to my maximum pleasure. Such a doctrine seems to be no less false psychologically, and ethically scarcely less objectionable, than the hedonistic Psychology itself^[37].(Bk. 1 Ch. 2 § 6 ¶ 1)

Of course there is a sense in which every action is interested. I cannot care for anything--my neighbour's good, the cause of learning or of sport or whatever it may be--unless it interests me. But this has, I suppose, never been denied. It simply amounts to saying that a desire which is to move me must be my desire. The question, as I conceive it, is whether the motive of every action is some future state of my own consciousness, or whether it may be some state of some other's consciousness, or some event in the objective world^[38]. To assert the former view would amount, as it appears to me, to saying that a man cannot be benevolent simply because he cares about his neighbour for that neighbour's sake, but only becase he wants to be a person conscious of his own benevolence. His neighbour's good is regarded not as an end but only as a means--a means to some state of his own soul, however spiritual or exalted that state may be supposed to be. Now such a doctrine seems to be simply a recrudescence of the old soul-saving view of life, which may so easily degenerate into something considerably more nauseous and offensive than an honest egoistic Hedonism which is naked and not ashamed. But the question with which we are now concerned is whether the doctrine is psychologically true. To my own mind it seems open to precisely the same line of objection which its supporters raise in arguing against Hedonism. It involves the same hysteron-proteron. It makes the anticipated satisfaction the condition of the desire, whereas the desire is really the condition of the satisfaction. If I cannot by any possibility be moved by my neighbour's calamity until I have satisfied myself that I shall get myself into a state of desirable moral exaltation by doing so, you cut away all possibility of explaining why such a state should be looked at as desirable or morally exalted. Unless I looked upon my neighbour's good as a thing for which I cared, or which possessed intricate value apart from any effect upon me, I should not think it a good state of mind for me to contribute or to have contributed to that good. It is precisely the unselfishness of the action which I find good. If I cared for my neighbour's welfare merely as a means to my own edification, I should not be unselfish. In many cases I cannot doubt that such acts are done entirely without the thought of self, or even of abstract duty: the desire of the other man's good acts as directly and immediately upon the will as the desire of one's own: while, so far as a reflective idea of goodness or duty enters into the motive, the very essence of that ideal of moral goodness or duty for its own sake is precisely this--that the thing should be done simply because Reason approves it, and without calculation as to how it will affect our own future consciousness.(Bk. 1 Ch. 2 § 6 ¶ 2)

The immediacy with which the conception that a thing is rational acts on the will is best seen perhaps in cases where no very important moral interest is at stake. A man with a taste for Bradshaw sees that certain trains are arranged badly and stupidly. He feels a disinterested aversion to such an irrational arrangement. He proceeds anonymously to write to the papers or to the Company's Traffic Manager. No reputation is to be got by the step, and he never expects to travel that way again. As little is he thinking of any future glow of self-satisfaction or of the improvement of his own character. The mere fact of the thing being irrational and as it should not be is a sufficient reason to a rational being for wanting to put it right. If you say he is uneasy at the thing being wrong and it is the uneasiness that moves him, you are of course falling once again into the hysteron-proteron in the form in which it got hold of Locke^[39]. You are explaining the desire (and consequent action) by the uneasiness, whereas it is really the desire that explains and occasions the uneasiness.(Bk. 1 Ch. 2 § 6 ¶ 3)

No doubt it may be freely admitted that when once an object is looked upon as good, as a thing that interests us, the desire to obtain for ourselves the moral good implied in the promotion of that object supplements, and fuses itself with, the desire that the object should be attained. Just as experience of the pleasure of satisfying a desire reacts upon and reinforces the desire itself, so with those highest desires which consist in devotion to some ideal aim or some form of other people's good the aspiration after goodness for ourselves mingles with and reinforces the desire that others should be benefited or the ideal aim promoted: the deisre to be good and the desire to do good blend into one. The proportion in which the desire for personal holiness on the one hand, and the desire for the promotion of objective interests on the other, enter into the motives of the best lives probably varies enormously even in the noblest characters. And from a practical point of view it is probably desirable that both elements should be present. The man who is only interested in people and causes is apt to be indifferent to aspects and departments of Morality which are really of great social importance; while the man who thinks only of his own spiritual condition is apt to become unhealthily introspective, if not anti-social. Both types of character are one-sided; but, if we had to choose between the two, it is hardly to the man who most consciously and deliberately regards his own family and his neighbours, the poor and the unfortunate, as the means to his own spiritual advancement, or as supplying occasions for the acquisition of merit, that we should accord the preference. Some of the the ethical questions on which we have here touched will demand our attention again. Meanwhile I content myself with repeating that, as a pure matter of Psychology, the theory that every desire is a desire for some form of personal good^[40] is open to every objection which its exponents have so convincingly urged against the hedonistic Psychology. The satisfaction of altruistic and other higher desires only comes to be regarded as our good because we care for a good which originally presents itself as a good which is not ours.(Bk. 1 Ch. 2 § 6 ¶ 4)