Now in the value, as has been said, we may distinguish both desire and feeling. The feelings, in Professor Dewey's phrase, are "absolutely pluralistic" and cannot be reduced to any one type, or two types, as pleasure and pain. The desires may be either intense or slight, without reference to the amount of the value, depending on circumstances. As stated, if we _have_ the object we value, the element of desire must be reduced to an _attitude_, to a disposition to desire, in the event the object should be lost. It remains a vague background of concern, of "anxiety lest the object escape," capable, of course, of springing into full intensity if need be. In æsthetic values, and in the values of mystical repose, we have cases where desire is,[132] thus, at a minimum. Strictly speaking, desire, as a conscious fact, has in it always a negative aspect, a privative aspect,--we desire when we are incomplete, when we lack. It is this negative aspect of desire which the Greek philosophers, as Aristotle, stressed, and which has led absolute idealism to eliminate desire from its conception of the Absolute Spirit. But desire has also a positive or active aspect, and in this aspect it remains in all values. Where the activity is perfectly unified,--a situation which we sometimes approximate,--we may not be conscious of desire, even though intense activity is going on. Since, however, the human mind is rarely in this state, and never completely in it, we may hold that desire, in its privative aspect, is always to some degree present, if only as a vague uneasiness. And as a disposition to activity, if the value should be threatened, desire is always present.
Conversely, desire may be at a maximum, and feeling at a minimum. If we do _not_ possess the object, if we are striving for it, while there may be and doubtless is feeling in connection with the desire, it cannot, obviously, be the _same_ feeling that we would experience if the object were present and quenching the desire. Indeed, it may be held that much of the feeling-accompaniment of intense desire is extraneous to the value-moment: that it is, in fact, kinæsthetic feeling, due to the stress of opposing muscular reactions, etc. The disposition to feel is there, and, if the object of desire be one that is familiar, the mere anticipation of it may call up traces of the feeling that its presence has in the past produced and will produce again. But the feeling element in such a situation is a minor phase.