If we were to enter at greater length into the relation between the different parts or elements or activities of our nature, with which we have just been dealing, we should find ourselves involved in many difficult and important matters of psychological controversy. Such psychological problems I wish in the present work to avoid in so far as their solution is not directly and immediately necessary for the purpose of Ethics. But by way of explaining my use of them, a few remarks may be added. I do not adopt the usage of those Psychologists who make feeling equivalent merely to pleasure and pain. Such a usage seems to imply an abstraction of the pleasure from its content, which is not what we really mean when we talk about feeling, and which tends to encourage the idea that we are interested in nothing but the hedonistic intensity of our consciousness apart from its content. By Thought or Reason I do not mean merely discursive thought to the exclusion of immediate perception, but the whole intellectual side of our consciousness; I include in it every kind of awareness. Desire I regard as belonging to the conative or striving side of our nature, though it implies also, and cannot exist apart from, both the intellectual and the feeling side of it: we must know in some measure what we desire, and the desire is itself a state of feeling, though it is more. An emotion is simply a name for a kind of feeling, but the term is usually and properly reserved for those states of feeling which are not, and do not immediately arise from, physical sensations, but imply the existence of ideas and of those higher desires which are directed towards ideal objects. It is obvious that in these distinctions we are concerned with aspects of consciousness rather than with distinct and separable things or facts or states. In some cases the distinction between them is clear and capable by an easy abstraction of a pretty sharp differentiation in our thought: in other cases they are simply the same thing looked at from a slightly different point of view. We have no difficulty for instance in distinguishing processes of mathematical calculation from the pleasant feeling by which they are accompanied in the mathematical mind, or the unpleasant feeling which those processes create in the unmathematical. On the other hand a simple perception of colour must be treated as an intellectual activity when we think of the recognized relation between the person or subject and his object, as a state of feeling when we think of it merely as a state of the subject and from the point of view of his interest in it. Similarly one and the same desire may be looked upon simply as a particular state of the subject and so as feeling, or as involving the intellectual idea of an end, or again as a conative activity tending to realize that end. Further to illustrate both distinctions between, and the inter-dependence of, these fundamental aspects of consciousness does not seem necessary to enable us to proceed with our ethical enquiry. All that need here be emphasized is that the value which we recognize in consciousness is not dependent upon any one of these aspects taken in absolute abstraction from another. The extremest Hedonist will find it impossible to attach a clear meaning to the idea of pleasure taken apart from all awareness that one is pleased, or of what one is pleased at; the extremest Rigorist would find it difficult to say what would be the value of a good will which did not know what it willed and did not care whether it willed it or not. And the moral consciousness does not encourage us to approximate to any such feats of abstraction, even in so far as this may be possible. It pronounces its judgement upon the value of consciousness as a whole. For the purpose of weighing one good against another and choosing between them in cases of collision, it may often have to attempt a relatively complete abstraction of one aspect from another; but it does not pronounce that any aspect has exclusive value, or that the value of one aspect is to be estimated entirely without reference to the others, or that the good can be conceived of under any one of them. The man is Reason, Feeling, Will; and the ideal state for man is an ideal state of all three elements in his nature in their ideal relation to one another.(Bk. 1 Ch. 3 § 5 ¶ 1)

At this point it is probable that the reader who is inclined to utilitarian ways of thinking will be disposed to ask, How do you know that knowledge is good, or (if you like so to express it) that the pleasures attending its pursuit and attainment are intrinsically superior to those of eating and drinking? The answer must be, I do as a matter of fact so judge: I judge it immediately, and, so far, a priori: my Reason so pronounces: judgements of value are ultimate, and no ethical position, utilitarian or other, can rest on anything but judgements of value. What is this, the reader is likely to exclaim, but sheer Intuitionism? How far I am prepared to accept this identification will appear from the next chapter^[64].(Bk. 1 Ch. 3 § 5 ¶ 2)