The desire for food--to return to that primary instance--though there are senses in which it is independent of self-consciousness, is not in those senses an element in our moral experience. As a determinant of our action as men, it is a desire for an object, of the presentation of which self-consciousness is the condition. Whether we take the object desired to be the removal of a particular pain or enjoyment of a particular pleasure, or the maintenance of life and strength, or some further object for the sake of which life and strength are sought; or whether we suppose a wish for each of these ends to be included in the unity of a will directed to the taking of food; in any case the object is rendered an object to us by a self which distinguishes itself from its experiences. The pain of hunger, the pleasure of eating, are alike presented as constituents in a universe of pains and pleasures, which the subject contemplates himself as possibly suffering and enjoying, and in relation to which he places the pain or pleasure that for the time predominates in his imagination. There is for him a world of feeling, however limited in its actual range yet boundless in capacity, of which he presents himself as the centre. It is by its relation to this world that any particular pleasure is defined for him as an object of desire, and thus, however animal in its origin, becomes to him, through such references to a before and after of experience, what it is not to the animal that feels but does not distinguish itself from its immediate feeling. This being true even of animal pleasure, if desired as an object or as we desire it, it is more plainly true of such an object as the maintenance of life and strength, and of any end for the sake of which life and strength are desired. To conceive his life as an end, to conceive ends for which he seeks to live, are clearly the functions only of a being who can distinguish the manifold of his experience actual and possible from himself, and at the same time gather it together as related to his single self. (§ 124 ¶ 1)