Appetites we are not thinking every instant of subduing pain and
attaining pleasure; we are ultimately moved by these feelings; but,
having once seen that the medium of their gratification is a certain
material object (food), we direct our whole aim to procuring that. The
hungry wolf ceases to think of his pains of hunger when he is in sight
of a sheep; but for these pains he would have paid no heed to the sheep;
yet when the sheep has to be caught, the hunger is submerged for the
time; the only relevant course, even on its account, is to give the
whole mind and body to the chase of the sheep. Butler calls this
indifferent or disinterested pursuit; and as much as says, that the wolf
is not self-seeking, but sheep-seeking, in its chase. Now, it is quite
true that if the wolf could give no place in its mind for anything but
its hungry pains, it would be in a bad way. It is wiser than that; it
knows the remedy; it is prepared to dismiss the pains from its thoughts,
in favour of a concentrated attention upon the distant flock. This
proves nothing as to its unselfishness; nor does it prove that Appetite
is a different thing from self-seeking or self-love.

[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