operations of the mind. By the aid of memory, which recalls the past; and of imagination, which represents the distant, the absent, and the future; and of reason, which exercises a judgment upon the utility present or prospective of an object, and upon the means of obtaining it, man forms desires concerning his personal safety, his family, and his property. These desires, like those already described, become, by the force of habit, daily more persistent and intense. To this class of desires no limit can be assigned other than the mental powers of each individual. These wants, except those relating to the family, might arise in a man isolated from all other beings of the same kind. But man is by the constitution of his nature a social being. Beginning with the family, he soon forms relations with other men, and lives, and moves, and has his being in society. Hence arise new desires, each of which, like every other desire, is intensified and confirmed by habit. Man is imitative, and so seeks to have what his neighbor enjoys; he is vain, and so desires to display himself and his possessions with advantage before his fellows; he loves superiority, and so seeks to show something that others have not; he dreads inferiority, and so seeks to possess what others also possess. Hence it is that, as daily experience teaches us, no man ever attains the state in which he has no wish ungratified. The greater the development of the mental and moral faculties, the greater will be the number of desires; the more continuous the gratification of these desires, the more confirmed will be the habit.

Human desires are indefinite not only as to their extent but as to their objects. The capacity of desire is strengthened and extended by exercise, but the desire is not necessarily felt for the same things. There are some objects to the use of which strict physical limits are set. There are others for which the pleasure depends, in a great degree, upon their scarcity. But in hardly any case does the increase of the object bring with it a proportionate increase of enjoyment. The sameness soon palls upon the taste; and if, as is usually the case, an extraordinary quantity of one object involve a corresponding diminution in the supply of others, one faculty or class of faculties is gratified

to the full extent that its nature will bear, while the other faculties are left unsupplied.

Not merely is the amount of human desire indefinite, but the modes in which desire in many different individuals is manifested, are equally without any practical limit. Even in the primary appetites there is room for great diversity, according to differences of climate, age, sex, and other considerations, in the choice of food, and the construction of houses, and the fashion of clothes. In the desires which are peculiar to man we seldom find agreement. The diversity of individual tastes is proverbial. Two persons will often regard with very different feeling the same object. The same man will at different times and in different circumstances experience great changes in his desires and his aversions. There is, however, a remarkable distinction in the facility with which desires can be appeased. It is in those cases in which the commodity is essential to our existence or our comfort that the limit to our gratification is soonest reached. Our most irrepressible appetites are the most quickly satisfied. Our most insatiable desires are the most easily repressed. Were it otherwise, with the present predominance of the self-regarding affections, the accumulation of the wealthy might interfere with the existence of the poor. Desire, too, is never transformed into a want, strictly so called, that is,

into painful desire, until it has been made such by habit; in other words, until the means of satisfying the desire have been found and placed irrevocably within our reach.

It is not difficult to perceive the cause of this diversity of desire, or to trace the circumstances on which the development of our wants depends. That cause is found where at first it might not be expected, but where its presence is consistent with a deeper investigation of our nature, in the state of our intellectual development. Beyond the mere primary appetites no other want can make itself known except through some mental operation. Our actions depend upon our will, and our will depends upon our judgment. If we seek to obtain any object, it is because we desire it; if we desire it, it is because we have formed some notion of its nature, and some judgment upon its

suitability to our purposes. According, then, to the degree with which we are acquainted with external objects, and to the power that we possess of judging of their relations to ourselves and to other things, our capacity of desire will be extended. Our desires, too, are subject to our will, and admit of being repressed or encouraged without assignable limits. It therefore depends upon the education, in the widest sense of that term, of each individual, and upon his character as mainly resulting from that education, how many and what kinds of objects, and with what degree of persistency, he desires. The more complete the intellectual development, the wider will be the field of desire; and, by the usual reaction in our mental nature, the wider the field of desire, the stronger will be the inducements to intellectual effort for the continuance of means to gratify these desires. On the contrary, the narrower our field of thought, the more contracted and the more humble will be our desires; and the less, consequently, will be the inducement to incur that continuous exertion of mind or body that industry implies. Where intelligence therefore prevails, the number of desires and the power of satisfying them will be alike great; where intelligence is small, the number of desires and the power of satisfying them will also be small. If this principle be true of individuals taken separately, it will not cease to be true of them when they are regarded as forming the aggregate that we term a nation. It requires but little observation to perceive the confirmation which these reasonings obtain from actual experiences. We know that the desires of educated men are more varied and more extended than those of persons without education. We know that the wages of educated men are higher, and consequently their means of gratifying their desires greater, than those of the uneducated. If an educated man be reduced by misfortune, we sympathize with the disproportion between his desires and his means of satisfying them. If an uneducated man become suddenly rich, we see that, from the limited extent of his former wants and the undeveloped condition of his desires, he literally does not know what to do with his money, and rushes into the most extravagant and ludicrous follies.

We see that if a man be content, like a dog, to eat his dinner and to sleep, his nature will gradually sink to that of a brute. The higher faculties will waste from disuse; the lower, in the absence of restraint, and from habitual exercise, will acquire a complete predominance. On the other hand, those nations and those classes of a nation who stand highest in the scale of civilization are those whose wants, as experience shows us, are the most numerous, and whose efforts to satisfy those wants are the most unceasing.

Nothing, therefore, can be further from the truth than the ascetic doctrine of the paucity and the brevity of human wants. So far from man wanting little here below, his wants are indefinite, and never cease to be so during his whole existence. Nor is there anything immoral in such a view. The supposed inconsistency arises from a confusion of apathy with content. The former term implies that the development of desire is repressed; the latter that it is regulated. Content is a judgment that, upon the whole, we cannot with our existing means improve our position, along with an unmurmuring submission to the hardships, if any, of that position. Its aim is not to satisfy desires, but to appease complaint; it is consequently not inconsistent with the most active efforts to alter that combination of circumstances upon which the judgment was formed. "The desire of amelioration, it has been truly said, is not less a moral principle than patience under afflictions; and the use of content is not to destroy, but to regulate and direct it."

So far from our wants being unworthy of our higher nature, we can readily trace their moral function and appreciate its importance. They not only prevent our retrogression, but secure our advancement. Our real state of nature consists not in the repression, but in the full development and satisfaction, of all those faculties of which our nature consists. Such a state is found not in the poverty of the naked savage, but in the wealth of the civilized man. It is the constant and powerful impulse of our varied and insatiable desires that urges us to avoid the one state and to tend towards the other. 66 Wants and enjoyments," says Bentham, "these universal agents in

society, after having raised the first ears of corn, will by degrees erect the granaries of abundance, always increasing and always full. Desires extend themselves with the means of gratification; the horizon is enlarged in proportion as we advance, and each new want, equally accompanied by its pleasure and its pain, becomes a new principle of action. Opulence, which is only a comparative term, does not arrest this movement when once it has begun; on the contrary, the greater the means, the greater the field of operations, the greater the reward, and consequently the greater the force of the motive which actuates the mind. But in what does the wealth of society consist, if not in the total of the wealth of the individuals composing it? And what more is required than the force of those natural motives for carrying the increase of wealth to the highest possible degree?” But these wants do not stimulate our acquisitive and inventive powers only. They also serve to discipline our moral nature. Many of man's proceedings are slow in their nature, and so he must practice patience. In like manner, he must expend some of his acquisitions with the view of acquiring more; and thus in addition to patience he must exercise hope. One great means of increasing his power is coöperation with his fellow-men; he must therefore, to some extent, subordinate or at least assimilate his will to theirs, and so he must learn forbearance. Thus the efforts that we make for the satisfaction of our wants supply the means for developing both our intellectual and our moral faculties.

The subject of this inquiry is the efforts made by man to secure enjoyment. The particular character of any enjoyable object is therefore, for the present purpose, indifferent. The question is not whether a given object be conducive to our general well-being, but simply whether it be enjoyable. If it be enjoyable, it is foreign to the purpose to consider whether the enjoyment to which it contributes be unmeaning or even immoral; or whether it be embodied in a tangible shape; or be merely a fleeting gratification of the sense; or be a permanent benefit to the body or the mind. We pass no judgment upon the character of the want or upon the manner in which it should