This being so, Egoistic Hedonism becomes a possible ethical ideal to which psychological Hedonism seems to point. If it can be shown that the ultimate aim of each of us in acting is always solely _some_ pleasure (or absence of pain) to himself, the demonstration certainly suggests that each _ought_ to seek his own _greatest_ pleasure.[45] As has been said, no cogent inference is possible from the psychological generalisation to the ethical principle: but the mind has a natural tendency to pass from the one position to the other: if the actual ultimate springs of our volition are always our own pleasures and pains, it seems _prima facie_ reasonable to be moved by them in proportion to their pleasantness and painfulness, and therefore to choose the greatest pleasure or least pain on the whole. Further, this psychological doctrine seems to conflict with an ethical view widely held by persons whose moral consciousness is highly developed: viz. that an act, to be in the highest sense virtuous, must not be done solely for the sake of the attendant pleasure, even if that be the pleasure of the moral sense; so that if I do an act from the sole desire of obtaining the glow of moral self-approbation which I believe will attend its performance, the act will not be truly virtuous. It seems therefore important to subject psychological Hedonism, even in its more indefinite form, to a careful examination. § 2. It will be well to begin by defining more precisely the question at issue. First, I will concede that pleasure is a kind of feeling which stimulates the will to actions tending to sustain or produce it,--to sustain it, if actually present, and to produce it, if it be only represented in idea--; and similarly pain is a kind of feeling which stimulates to actions tending to remove or avert it.[46] It seems convenient to call the felt volitional stimulus in the two cases respectively Desire[47] and Aversion; though it should be observed that the former term is ordinarily restricted to the impulse felt when pleasure is not actually present, but only represented in idea. The question at issue, then, is not whether pleasure, present or represented, is normally accompanied by an impulse to prolong the actual or realise the represented feeling, and pain correspondingly by aversion: but whether there are no desires and aversions which have not pleasures and pains for their objects--no conscious impulses to produce or avert results other than the agent’s own feelings. In the treatise to which I have referred, Mill explains that “desiring a thing, and finding it pleasant, are, in the strictness of language, two modes of naming the same psychological fact.” If this be the case, it is hard to see how the proposition we are discussing requires to be determined by “practised self-consciousness and self-observation”; as the denial of it would involve a contradiction in terms. The truth is that an ambiguity in the word Pleasure has tended to confuse the discussion