he performance of these. It is not because
we want the pleasure of eating, that we decide to eat;
we want to eat, and eating is therefore pleasant.

If the good Samaritan cared about the present feelings or the
future welfare of the man fallen among thieves, it would no doubt give
him some pleasure to satisfy that desire for his welfare; if he had
desired his good as little as the priest and the Levite, there would
have been nothing to suggest the strange idea that to relieve him, to
bind up his nasty wounds, and to spend money upon him, would be
a source of more pleasure to himself than to pass by on the other side
and spend the money upon himself. In the case of the great majority
of our pleasures, it will probably be found that the desire is the
condition of the pleasure, not the pleasure of the desire.[1]

[Footnote 1: Rashdall: _Ethics_, p. 18.]

As has been previously pointed out in this and other chapters,
action does not start with reflection upon pleasures, or,
for that matter, upon anything else. Action is fundamentally
initiated by instinctive promptings, or the promptings of
habit. Satisfaction or pleasure attends the fulfillment of any
inborn or acquired impulse, and dissatisfaction or pain its
obstruction or frustration. Apart from the satisfactions
experienced in the fulfillment in action of such impulses,
pleasure does not exist. Actions, situations, persons, or ideas
can be pleasant to us, but "pleasure" as a separate objective
entity cannot be said to exist at all. The Utilitarians, again,
made the intellectualist error of supposing that men dispassionately
and mathematically weighed the consequences of
their actions, whereas their relative impulsions to action are
determined by the instincts they inherit and the habits they
have already acquired.

Despite its false psychology, Utilitarianism does stand out
as one of the great classic attempts to build an ethical theory
squarely designed to promote human happiness. An execution
of the same worthy intention, more acceptable to those
trained in the modern psychology of instinct, is that moral
conception variously known as Behaviorism, or Energism,
a point of view maintained by thinkers from Aristotle to
Professor Dewey in our own day. All behavioristic theories
take the position that in order to find out what is good for
man, we must begin by finding out what man is. In order to
discover what will give man satisfaction, we must discover
what his