Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/331

Ch. 21 it itself: because the absence of good is not always a pain, as the presence of pain is. And therefore absent good may be looked on and considered without desire. But so much as there is anywhere of desire, so much there is of uneasiness.

§ 32. That desire is a state of uneasiness, every one who reflects on himself will quickly find. Who is there that has not felt in desire what the wise man says of hope (which is not much different from it), "that it being deferred makes the heart sick ?" and that still proportionable to the greatness of the desire; which sometimes raises the uneasiness to that pitch, that it makes people cry out, Give me children, give me the thing desired, or I die? Life itself, and all its enjoyments, is a burden cannot be born under the lasting and unremoved pressure of such an uneasiness.

§ 33. Good and evil, present and absent, it is true, work upon the mind: but that which immediately determines the will, from time to time, to every voluntary action, is the uneasiness of desire, fixed on some absent good; either negative, as indolence to one in pain; or positive, as enjoyment of pleasure. That it is this uneasiness that determines the will to the successive voluntary actions, whereof the greatest part of our lives is made up, and by which we are conducted through different courses to different ends, I shall endeavour to show, both from experience and the reason of the thing.

§ 34. When a man is perfectly content with the state he is in, which is, when he spring of is perfectly without any uneasiness, what industry, what action, what will is there left, but to continue in it? of this every man's observation will satisfy him. And thus we see our All-wise Maker, suitably to our constitution and frame, and knowing what it is that determines the will, has put into man the uneasiness of hunger and thirst, and other natural desires, that return at their seasons to move and