322 ALEXANDER F. SHAND : evil again transforms desire into aversion. There he stands between these opposite goals, hemmed in in a course that inevitably leads from one to the other, with a simultaneous aversion for both ; and shrinking to the last he is pushed forward to the one goal by the greater horror behind him. While in the common types of volition there is desire to do what we will to do, either for itself or some ulterior con- sequence, here there is desire not to do what we will to do, and desire that death, the ultimate consequence of our action, may not be realised. It is the extreme opposite of the type which psychologists 1 have described as universal, and admitting of no exceptions. And we can conceive of a third that occupies an intermediate position between these extremes. Volition may stand in three typical relations to desire : (1) we may will to do what we desire to do ; (2) we may will to do what we desire to escape from doing ; (3) we may will to do what we have no desire of doing. In other words, we may feel either desire or aversion for what we are going to do, or, conceivably, neither one nor the other. There is another type familiar to those who have an experience of self-sacrifice, in which the sacrifice of one of ourselves is undertaken, not in a mood of warm and exalted emotion, but in the calm, austere spirit of the northern Teutonic races, where duty, for duty's sake, ordains the sacrifice. It is "a dreary resignation," "a desolate and acrid sort of act, an excursion into a lonesome moral wilderness". 2 Do you think that at the moment at which you were to resolve to go out into this "wilderness," you would feel any desire to be there ? Do you think that in the heart-rending struggle which precedes, you would be led to such a self-sacrifice by the pleasant impulse of desire ? Of course, we know that a soul so high-strung loves duty, and desires to follow it. But where is the love, and where the desire, at the moment of a great surrender ? The end is still desirable, but does desire occur as a psychical fact? The end is desirable ; it is an end we ought to desire ; it has moral value ; we do desire it at other times ; nay, more, were only the burden of this sacrifice lifted, we should desire it anew. But as when a youth is in love, his favourite occupations and the books in which he took delight, delight him no more, and his intellectual ambition is under an eclipse, because all the desire of his being is absorbed into the system of this over- 1 Mr. Bradley is an exception : see his " Pleasure, Pain, Desire and Volition," MIND, xiii. 2 William James, Prin. of Psy., vol. ii., p. 634.
