The desire for worth was referred to as a human character, absent in the animals where there is only a desire for satisfaction. The two are analogous, and yet fundamentally different. Pleasure is craved; worth is what we feel we ought to crave. The two have been confused, with the worst results for psychology and ethics. There has been a similar confusion between personality and persons, between recognition and memory, sexuality and love.
All these antitheses have been continually confused, and, what is even more striking, almost always by men with the same views and theories, and with the same object--that of trying to obliterate the difference between man and the lower animals.
There are other less known distinctions which have been equally neglected. Limited consciousness is an animal trait; the active power of noticing is a purely human one. It is evident that there is something in common in the two facts, but still they are very different. Desire, or impulse, and will are nearly always spoken of as if they were identical. The former is common to all living creatures, but man has, in addition, a will, which is free, and no factor of psychology, because it is the foundation of all psychological experiences. The identification of impulse and will is not solely due to Darwin; it occurred also in Schopenhauer’s conception of the will, which was sometimes biological, sometimes purely philosophical.
I may group the two sets of factors as follows:
Common to men and animals, Limited to mankind, and in fundamentally organic. particular to the males of mankind.
Limitation of the field of Faculty of “taking consciousness. notice.”
The series shows that man possesses not only each character which is found in all living things, but also an analogous and higher character peculiar to himself. The old tendency at once to identify the two series and to contrast them seems to show the existence of something binding together the two series, and at the same time separating them. One may recall in this connection the Buddhistic conception of there being in man a superstructure added to the characters of lower existences. It is as if man possessed all the properties of the beasts, with, in each case, some special quality added. What is this that has been added? How far does it resemble, and in what respects does it differ from, the more primitive set?