[39] ‘Willing’ is a bad word; I would use conation throughout were it not so likely to increase unnecessarily the difficulty which this chapter will unavoidably present to readers who are not familiar with psychological jargon. The essential thing is to think of willing (desiring, striving towards, trying) as an unconscious as much as a conscious process. [40] This topic is discussed at length in _The Meaning of Meaning_. CHAPTER XII Pleasure The poor benefit of a bewitching minute.—_The Revenger’s Tragedy_. Sensation, imagery, feeling, emotion, together with pleasure, unpleasure and pain are names for the conscious characteristics of impulses: How they may best be sorted out is a problem whose difficulty is much aggravated by the shortcomings of language at this point. We speak, for instance, of pleasures and pains in the same fashion, as though they were of the same order, but, strictly, although pains as single self-sufficing modifications of consciousness are easily enough obtainable, pleasures by themselves do not seem to occur. Pleasure seems to be a way in which something happens, rather than an independent happening which can occur by itself in a mind. We have, not pleasures, but experiences of one kind or another, visual, auditory, organic, motor, and so forth, which are pleasant. Similarly we have experiences which are unpleasant. If, however, we call them painful we give rise to an ambiguity. We may be saying that they are unpleasant or we may be saying that they are accompanied by pains, which is a different matter. The use of the term pleasure, as though like pain it was itself a complete experience, instead of being something which attaches to or follows along with or after other experiences, has led to a number of confusions; especially in those critical theses, to which objection has already been taken in Chapter IX, which identify value with pleasure.