Mere wishing, the mere floating fancy of this or that thing as desirable, is not desire. To _want_ is an active projection of character; really and deeply to want is no surface and passing feeling; it is the stirring of character to its depths. There may be repressed activity; that is not, of itself, desire. There may be an image of larger activity; that is not, of itself, desire. But given the _consciousness_ of a repressed activity in view of the perception of a possible larger action, and a man strives within himself to break his bonds and reach the new satisfaction. This striving within one's self, before the activity becomes overt, is the emotional antecedent of action. But this inward striving or tension, which constitutes desire, is so far from being _mere_ emotion that it is character itself--character as it turns an inward or ideal advance into an outward, or real progress, into action.
We may fall back on Aristotle's statement (page 38, of Peters' translation of his ethics): "The pleasure or pain that accompanies an act must be regarded as a _test_ of _character_. He who abstains from the pleasures of the body and rejoices in his abstinence is temperate, while he who is vexed at having to abstain is still profligate. As Plato tells us, man needs to be so trained from youth up as to take pleasure and pain _in the right objects_."
The truth in hedonism is its conviction that the good, the end of man, is not to be found in any outward object, but only in what comes home to man in his own conscious experience. The error is in reducing this experience to mere having, to bare feelings or affections, eliminating the element of doing. It is this doing which satisfies man, and it is this which involves as its content (as knowledge of impulse, instead of blind impulse) objective and permanent ends. When Mill speaks of the end of desire as a "satisfied life," (p. 317 of Utilitarianism) he carries our assent; but to reduce this satisfied life to feelings of pleasure, and absence of pains, is to destroy the life and hence the satisfaction. As Mill recognizes, a life bounded by the agent's own feelings would be, as of course, a life "centred in his own miserable individuality." (Mill, p. 319). Such words have meaning only because they suggest the contrast with activity in which are comprehended, as 'ends' or 'objects' (that is, as part of its defined content) things--art, science and industry--and persons (see Secs. 34 and 35).