Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/258

1925] distinguish all the elements contained in this process, we should be able to answer the questions: What is energy and change? What is life? What is the Self which lives and acts?

Here it is necessary to analyse Desire as the state out of which Volition rises—Now first of all, we see that voluntary action springs out of the mental state called Desire. Desire contains, so to speak, the whole Self with all its correlative functions fused into one. It is founded on a consciousness of want, defect, insufficiency. This rises from its awareness of its past and present conditions (derived from experience), and an anticipation of future conditions (founded on reasoning); and from a consciousness of what is good and of a highest Good; and of our own present deficiency, inferiority and need, and of our own nature as essentially energy pressing onwards towards Good. Out of this groundwork of knowledge and this cognition of deficiency, a painful feeling rises, which we may speak of as feeling of Want. But along with this painful feeling of Want (except in cases of despair and extreme despondency) there is also a feeling of Hope which is pleasurable, rising from thinking the probability of coming relief. Indeed there could be no feeling of want without the cognition of something which, if present, would remove the want. That something will be a good, leading on to a more remote highest Good. But this good is present only in Idea—the future in the present. Desire therefore is made to be what it is by the Idea of possible good or goods leading on to a highest Good. Now the essence of life consists in a perpetual striving towards self-preservation, self-development, and towards self-realisation as a Good containing all other goods under it. Hence, in the case of every new action, the energy which is the essence of the self, takes the from of removing this particular Want by realising this particular idea of Good (and more remotely thereby the Highest Good). Thus Desire contains an element of rudimentary action straining and impulse from within which