If no pain was felt in the experience of unreality and lack, if there was mere passivity, desire would not be generated. This pain of loss spurs the mind to achieve desire, and desire enables the organism to attain the advantageous. At length a conventionalized world of desirables so formed, and certain significances, become so inground into experience that they seem often to be instinctively and immediately recognised by the individual, anterior to any personal learning by experience, as in cases of instinctive fear of, and desire for, certain objects. While desire is attained at the incitement of pain, it is in itself a painful mental act. The emotional going out toward the _desideratum_ is in itself a painful mode of consciousness. The feeling I have for the bonbon which I see and desire is, so far as desire, painful, yet negatively and comparatively, it may be pleasurable in that this psychosis may supplant one more painful still. It may be said that desire is painful, and also lack of desire, or _ennui_. But mere desirelessness is not _ennui_. _Ennui_ is a feeling of lack and loss, and so a feeling of desire, but a peculiar kind of desire. It is desire for activity, when by a morbid _status_ there is no desire moving to activity. Lack of desire and interest in things may be painfully revealed to some active natures, but to the great majority of psychisms it is a pleasure state. As far as we can judge, the undesire of the cow leisurely chewing her cud in a warm corner of the barn yard is supreme felicity. A state of desirelessness, complete yet blissful, occasionally visits even the consciousness of the nineteenth century busy-body. But the normality of desire for human adult consciousness in general is apparent to all. One who loses all interest or desire loses hold on life. Thus desire is life, and even when it is sought to extinguish it either as dictated by a philosophical maxim or by religious and moral scruples, on account of the innate selfishness of desire—Madame Guyon, for instance—yet desire is sure to intrude, and must as a desire to destroy desire. So whether we _would_ fly, or _would_ reach desire, we thereby desire. We may uproot or cultivate certain kinds of desire which thereby become objects of aversion or desire, but the effort to extinguish desire as general fact of psychic life involves either a psychological indefinite _regressus_ which is never desireless, or else it means the extinction of consciousness itself in any grade above the lowest.