spirits to do his bidding:

I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I'll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings.

Many other things his fancy pictures. But we observe that philosophy
stands below wealth and feasting in his wishes. He dismisses
Mephistophilis back to Lucifer with this report of himself:

Say, he surrenders up to him his soul,
So he will spare him four and twenty years,
Letting him live in all voluptuousness.

For a moment his enthusiastic outlook upon limitless capacity wakens in
him a desire for military glory: he would be 'great emperor of the
world', he would 'pass the ocean with a band of men'. But from what we
know of his subsequent career he never attempted to win such renown. No;
in his heart he confesses,

The god thou servest is thine own appetite.

Mephistophilis, with a profound and melancholy insight into the reality
of things, sees hell in every place where heaven is not. Faustus, on the
other hand, with flippant superficiality laughs at the idea. An
intellectual, a moral hell is to him incomprehensible.

Nay, an this be hell, I'll willingly be damned:
What! sleeping, eating, walking, and disputing!
But, leaving this, let me have a wife,
The fairest maid in Germany;
For I am wanton and lascivious,
And cannot live without a wife.

Sometimes conscience forces him to listen to its fearful whispers, and
then suicide offers its dreadful means as a silencer of their disturbing
warnings. Why does he not accept the relief of rope or dagger?

--Long ere this I should have done the deed,
Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair.
Have not I made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander's love and Oenon's death?
And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,
Made music with my Mephistophilis?
Why should I die, then, or basely despair?
I am resolved; Faustus shall not repent.

The mood of fear and regret passes. He plunges back to the gratification
of his senses.

Whilst I am here on earth let me be cloyed
With all things that delight the heart of man:
My four-and-twenty years of liberty
I'll spend in pleasure and in dalliance.

The end is drawing near. Appetite