as in the attempt to construe the difference between mere bodily movements and actions in terms of acts of volition , so here in the case of wanting when this is identified with some Humean cause of doing , we are faced with a manifest contradiction . construed as an internal impression which is thought to function as a cause that issues in some item of so-called overt behaviour ( whether this be some bodily movement or an action is of no matter for our present purposes ) , the impression must be describable without reference to any event or object distinct from it . it must be possible to characterize that internal impression without invoking any reference to the so-called object of the desire , no less than the action that consists either in getting or in trying to get that object . but as a desire , no account is intelligible that does not refer us to the thing desired . the supposition , then , that desiring or wanting is a Humean cause , some sort of internal tension or uneasiness , involves the following contradiction : as Humean cause or internal impression , it must be describable without reference to anything else - object desired , the action of getting or the action of trying to get the thing desired ; but as desire this is impossible . any description of the desire involves a logically necessary connection with the thing desired . no internal impression could possibly have this logical property . hence , a desire can not possibly be an internal impression . this contradiction comes close to the surface in a number of familiar accounts of wanting . wanting is usually identified with some internal mental event - a felt tension or uneasiness . but as internal event , whether mental or physiological , there is no intrinsic feature of that event that reveals its connection with anything else ; yet as desire the very characterization of the desire involves a reference to the thing desired . hence Hobbes &apos; interesting remark about the intimate relation between names applied to desires and the objects of desire . shall we then say with G F Stout that desire and aversion , endeavour to and endeavour from , are modes of attention ? certainly if there is endeavour to x , there must be attention to x . but if we think of a desire as an internal event that causes or produces an endeavour to the thing in question , then it is self-contradictory to say that the desire is both cause and the attention involved in the endeavour which this cause produces , just as much so as it is for Prichard to say in the case of so-called acts of volition that such acts are causes and also involve the idea of that which they produce . alternatively , if the desire just is the endeavour , it is difficult to see how there could be desire without endeavour , i.e without trying to get the thing desired . but putting this aside , we shall have to say that this endeavour , mental or physiological , involves the idea of that towards which the endeavour is directed - endeavour being necessarily endeavour to something , just as a desire is necessarily a desire for something . and this implies that the endeavour can not possibly be a causal factor in the proceedings that issue in the getting of what is desired , since if it were , it would be possible to describe it without referring in any way to anything else in or out of the proceedings , including the thing in question towards which the endeavour is directed . Hobbes and his present-day followers who speak of the endeavours of the body or of physiological drives are similarly involved in contradiction . physiological occurrences are blind ; as such they can be described without reference to anything else including the thing wanted , or the objective of the endeavour . as drives , endeavours or desires , no such logical divorce is possible . the whole modern picture from Hobbes on down , of wanting or desiring as interior events that operate in some sort of causal mechanism of the mind or body , is in fact a disastrous muddle . so far I have been concerned with this logical feature of a desire , namely , that a desire , whatever else it may be , is a desire for something . but there are other important features of the concept of desiring or wanting which this modern picture simply can not accommodate and which therefore spell disaster for this view of the matter . it will be remembered that I began this discussion by considering the truism that because one wants or desires one does ; in other words , that we explain conduct by reference to , among other things , what agents want or desire . but if desiring is some sort of interior event that functions as a causal condition , no such explanation is possible . desiring , on this modern view , is some sort of causal factor , an itch , twitch , internal impression , tension or physiological occurrence ; but as such , supposing that these are causal factors , it can give rise only to other occurrences . an action , however , is no mere matter of bodily happening . grant then that wanting or desiring explains the bodily movements that take place when a person does anything , e.g raises his arm in order to signal ; as internal occurrence what it explains , at best , is the bodily movement that occurs when the person raises his arm , not the action he performs which we describe as raising his arm or , further , as signalling . a gap then appears in the alleged explanation , between bodily occurrence and action performed , and what is purported to be an explanation of conduct turns out to be nothing of the kind . but like many another gap that appears in philosophy ( here readers will be reminded of the familiar gap with which moral philosophers are plagued between the is and the ought , between matters of fact and matters of morality , between description and evaluation ) , this one is a product of our own confusion . specifically , it is the failure to recognize the logical relation between the concept of wanting or desiring and that of action , including the logical scaffolding that gives the latter term its import or use in our language . earlier I contended that by no logical alchemy is it possible to make good the claim that an action is a bodily movement plus some other concurrent factor . suppose , for argument &apos;s sake , we take as concurrent factor , wanting or desiring . then the latter can be understood independently of the concept of the action . if we explain A in terms of B and C , our explanation , if it is to avoid circularity , presupposes that C can be understood without invoking A . so if the action of raising the arm can be understood as the bodily movement incurred in raising the arm together with a desire , one can understand the desire without invoking the idea of this action . this implies that the desire can not possibly be the desire to raise one &apos;s arm , since it would be circular to define the action of raising one &apos;s arm as a bodily movement together with the desire to raise one &apos;s arm . but is it possible , in general , to define action as bodily movement or happening plus desire ? only if we can understand what a desire is without invoking the concept of an action . is this possible ? only if in our account of the action of raising one &apos;s arm , we do not invoke any desire to do , e.g the desire to notify others that one is about to make a turn . or , if we do this , only if we go on to explain a desire to do in terms of a desire together with some feature of the desire which does not involve a reference to doing at all - in which case the desire to do would then be reduced to some sort of occurrence called a desire having a feature that could be described without reference to any doing at all . now what sort of thing called a desire could this possibly be ? here is one suggestion : the desire is a desire for something , e.g the food that one will get if such-and-such things take place . let us then see if it is possible to explain the desire to do in terms of a desire for something . in our example , this then is the situation : one is hungry ; food is around the corner , so one notifies others that one is about to make a turn in order to get food ; one desires to notify others that one is about to make a turn and one desires to do what is needed in order to get the food ; but to say that one desires to do these things can be explained or elucidated simply and solely in terms of the presence of a certain occurrence called the desire for food . on this suggestion , the notion of desiring to do is elucidated in terms of the logically prior notion of a desire for something . here I shall not dwell further upon the now obvious and fatal objection to the identification of the desire for something with some internal occurrence , an objection that is decisive in refuting the contention that an action consists of the dual occurrence of bodily movement and internal event . what I want to examine now is the contention that desires for something are somehow logically more primitive or basic than desires to do , and hence that it is possible to understand the notion of a desire without invoking the concept of an action . there are two questions here : first , is it possible to want or to have a desire for something without wanting to do , and secondly , is it possible that one may have what one wants but not want to do anything with it ? consider the first question . if I want food but do nothing to get it , that surely is intelligible . I may be unable to get it when , for example , I am tied and gagged . or , I may do nothing to get it because I am fasting - doctor &apos;s orders , you know . or , I may want this food before me but since it disagrees with me I do nothing to get it . but can I want this food , but not want to do anything to get it ? this much is possible : the food is on display in a shop , I have no money , and the only way I can get it is by stealing . now I do not want to steal - least of all do I want to get it by stealing - let it be that I want to refrain from doing anything that is stealing . does it follow that I do not want to get the food ? certainly not , since if this did follow it would be logically impossible for anyone to be tempted . the man who is tempted wants to get something despite the fact that by getting it he will be doing the wrong thing ; his trouble is that he finds some difficulty in refraining from getting what he wants to get , not that he does not want to get what he wants . if he did not want to get what he wants , it would be impossible for him to be tempted . nor is it necessary to hold that if a man wants to get food , where getting it would be stealing , that he must be tempted to steal . temptation is a strong term . the man who is tempted feels the urge to do something to which he has an aversion and must resist it ; but a man may want to get something but remain steadfastly in control of his desire and feel no temptation . now one way of establishing complete self-control is by losing the desire for the thing in question - this in fact is how the man who wants to lose the urge for smoking succeeds . but one may , as in the case of our example of the man who wants food , continue to want it and yet remain free from temptation . if , indeed , we are inclined to deny that if a man wants the food , he must want to get it , this is because of the failure to recognize that , in the particular circumstances , the person would be doing not one thing - getting the food - but at least two things : not only would he be getting the food , but in doing this he would also be stealing . 