It is hardly necessary, I am sure, to labor the point very much. There is the instinct to be curious: it disposes one man to measure the diameter of Betelgeuse when he is forty years old; when he was a child it disposed him to find out whether he could hang up a cat by its tail; that curious child’s companion in the experiment on the cat was disposed, when he grew up, to take much trouble in finding out how much income tax his neighbor paid and whether his employer was faithful to his wife. The parental instinct of one man is to launch his child on the world as an independent human being; in another man the instinct manifests itself as a determination to have children who will depend upon him and cater to him all his days long. So when we make lists of our impulses we really do not know enough about them to pass judgment. For desires are complex, and their greatest complexity lies in the fact that they change. The objects of desire are no less complex. Take, for example, a jade goddess. To a Chinese coolie it is an object with mysterious powers, a part of the mechanism which governs the universe. But the jade goddess is now in a Fifth Avenue shop window, and a policeman on his beat [p170] sees it. It is a green stone figure to him. The dealer inside knows that it is rare and is worth a thousand dollars. The collector could enjoy it immensely if he possessed it. The connoisseur finds intricate pleasure in it as a work of art and an elaborate interest in it as a memento of a whole culture. The objects of desire, then, are not simple things. We help to create them. We say that this man desires that woman. But what, in fact, does he desire? A few moments of ecstasy from her body, something which a thousand women could give him equally well, or an intimate union with so much of her whole being that for that very reason she is unique to him? The quality of his passion and the character of his mistress will depend in a very large degree on how much of her being he takes into account. It depends also, I hasten to add, on how much there is to take into account. At any moment in our lives we desire only those objects which we are then capable of desiring and in the way we are then capable of desiring them. But our desires do not remain fixed from the cradle to the grave. They change. And as they change the desirability of objects about us changes too. It is impossible, then, to make lists of good and evil desires and of good and evil objects. For good and evil are qualities in the relationship between variable desires and variable objects of desire.