  Bradley’s excursion into moral psychology represents an effort to explain the process whereby one identifies one’s satisfaction with a particular ideal object, which is an essential element in the structure of volitional action. He traces the transitions from a very primitive state of mental life through to the sort of consciousness exhibited by a mature moral agent. From primitive appetites which involve a precursor self that affirms itself through its desires we arrive at a variety of types of actions and of objects of volition and different relations between the self and the objects. Children move from the simple desire to possess the object to the pleasure taken in the approval of others, to self-conscious moral action and its pleasures. These stages also reveal the development of feelings and emotions and an increasing range of types of object that one might take pleasure in. In other words, there is an extension of the individual’s range of interests and these move out beyond desired objects to an interest in other people and future events and so on. In this process the self is developing its conception of itself and once it recognizes that its fate is tied to that of society we have a social self that does not see itself as being indifferent to the interests of others.