[APPETITE DECLARED UNSELFISH.]

There may be disinterested motives in our constitution; but Appetite is
not in any sense one of these. We may have instincts answering to the
traditional phrase used in defining instinct, "a blind propensity" to
act, without aiming at anything in particular, and without any
expectation of pleasure or benefit. Such instincts would conform to
Butler's notion of appetite: they would be entirely out of the course of
self-love or self-seeking of any sort. Whether the nest-building
activity of birds, and the constructiveness of ants, bees, and beavers,
comply with this condition, I do not undertake to say. There is one
process better known to ourselves, not exactly an instinct, but probably
a mixture of instinct and acquirement--I mean the process of
Imitation--which works very much upon this model. Although coming under
the control of the Will, yet in its own proper character it operates
blindly, or without purpose; neither courting pleasure, nor chasing
pain. In like manner, Sympathy, in its most characteristic form,
proceeds without any distinct aim of pleasure to ourselves.

Nothing of this can be affirmed of the Appetites. In them, nature places
us, as Bentham says, under the government of two sovereign masters,
_pain_ and _pleasure_. An appetite would cease to move us, if its
painful and pleasurable accompaniments were done away with. It matters
not that we remit our attention, at times, to the pain or the pleasure;
these are always in the background; and the strength of the appetite is
their strength.

So far as concerns Butler's example of the Appetites, there is no case
for the view that to obtain happiness we must avoid aiming at it