=Hedonistic Theory of Desire.=--That phase of utilitarianism which holds that the object of desire is pleasure, is termed hedonism, or sometimes psychological hedonism to distinguish it from ethical hedonism, the theory that pleasure is the standard for judging acts. The fundamental fallacy of psychological hedonism has been well stated by Green to be supposing that a desire can be aroused or created by the anticipation of its own satisfaction--i.e., in supposing that the idea of the pleasure of exercise arouses desire for it, when in fact the idea of exercise is pleasant only if there be already some desire for it (Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, p. 168). Given a desire already in existence, the idea of an object which is thought of as satisfying that desire will always arouse pleasure, or be thought of as pleasurable. But hedonism fails to consider the radical difference between an object's arousing pleasure, because it is regarded as satisfying desire, and the thought of a pleasure arousing a desire:--although the feeling of agreeableness may intensify the movement towards the object. A hungry man thinks of a beefsteak as that which would satisfy his appetite; his thought is at once clothed with an agreeable tone and the conscious force of the appetite is correspondingly intensified; the miser thinks of gold in a similar way; the benevolent of an act of charity, etc. But in each case the presence of the pleasurable element is dependent upon the thought of an object which is not pleasure--the beefsteak, the gold. The thought of the object _precedes_ the pleasure and excites it because it is felt to promise the satisfaction of a desire. =Pleasure is the Felt Concomitant of Imagining a Desire Realized in Its Appropriate Object.=--The object of desire is not pleasure, but some object is pleasurable because it is the congenial terminus of desire. The pleasure felt is a _present_ pleasure, the pleasure which _now_ accompanies the idea of the satisfied desire. It intensifies the desire in its present character, through opposition to the disagreeable tone of the experienced lack and want.