Book i. chap. ii. note), arguing for the universal painfulness of

desire, urges that the so-called “pleasures of pursuit” are really pleasures of “progressive attainment”; what causes pleasure being the series of partial attainments that precede the final attainment. There seems to me much truth in this view, as regards some forms of pursuit; but in other cases I can find nothing deserving the name in the course of the pursuit: the prominent element of the pleasure seems to be clearly the reflex of eager and hopeful, perhaps consciously skilful, activity. _E.g._ this is often the case in the pursuit of truth, scientific or historical. I have spent most pleasant hours in hunting for evidence in favour of a conjecture that had occurred to me as a possible solution of a difficult historical question, without any “progressive attainment” at all, as I found no evidence of any importance: but the pleasure had none the less been real, at any rate in the earlier part of the pursuit. Or take the common experience of deer-stalking, or the struggle for victory in an evenly balanced game of chess, or a prolonged race in which no competitor gains on the others till near the end. I find nothing like “progressive attainment” in these cases.

But even granting Mr. Mackenzie’s view to be more widely applicable than I think it, the question it deals with seems to me in the main irrelevant to the issue that I am now discussing: since it remains true that the presence of antecedent desire is an essential condition of the pleasures of attainment--whether “progressive” or “catastrophic”--and that the desire is not itself perceptibly painful.

[52] Lecky, _Hist. of European Morals_, Introduction.

[53] I must ask the reader to distinguish carefully the question discussed in this chapter, which relates to the _objects_ of desires and aversions, from the different question whether the _causes_ of these impulses are always to be found in antecedent experiences of pleasure and pain. The bearing of this latter question on Ethics, though not unimportant, is manifestly more indirect than that of the question here dealt with: and it will be convenient to postpone it till a later stage of the discussion. Cf. _post_, Book ii. chap. vi. § 2, and Book iv. chap. iv. § 1.