ESSAYS 49i 



acquired by the most Herculean efforts on his part — how can it be maintained 

 that he has any ethical or sociological claim to the harvest of that which biology 

 proves he had no finger in sowing ? He is in the position of a trustee with huge 

 responsibilities but with no ethical claim to be a beneficiary, except in so far as he 

 is one unit of the beneficiary community. I admit that he is a compulsory 

 trustee — in the very nature of the case he could not have been consulted as to 

 whether he would be endowed with genius and trusteeship, or left unendowed and 

 comparatively irresponsible ; but happily to genius the chief joy of life is the 

 exercise of genius ; and, therefore, he suffers nothing, but rather gains, by the 

 moral obligation to exercise his gift to the fullest — though for the benefit of 

 the Community rather than of himself. Since neither himself nor any one person 

 among his ancestors endowed him with that genius which has somehow resulted 

 from the combination of countless germplasms of the past, we can only say that 

 to the present Community as a whole ethically and sociologically belongs the 

 harvest of the genius which the Community of the past has unconsciously some- 

 how sown, and which the protective and life-sustaining activities of the Community 

 through a series of generations have enabled at last to develop. 



In common graciousness, in common decency, in common policy, any properly 

 organised Community will ensure to the inventor or creator a substantial personal 

 reward, not only equalling but exceeding the income accorded to the most 

 industrious, etc., worker of similar education, and in very full proportion to intel- 

 lectual and aesthetic as well as to merely material needs : but biology seems con- 

 clusively to decide that the bulk of the harvest of genius is ethically the property 

 of the Community and not of the individual. To put it in the concrete— if a great 

 artist can make thousands a year, a special pleader tens of thousands, or an 

 outstanding engineering or chemical inventor a still huger income, by the exercise 

 of his genius, I utterly deny that he is ethically entitled to pocket more than a 

 proportion in the first case, a pretty small proportion in the second, and an almost 

 vanishingly small proportion in the third ; and I affirm — basing myself on " laws " 

 of biology — that the bulk of the gain belongs ethically to the Community. 1 



Now, moreover, it must be pointed out that on ultimate analysis — as already 

 hinted— -the qualities commended under (1 a), or their potentialities, are really 

 also inborn. Thus, after all, biological deductions may seem to cut away the 

 bases of even so much Individualism as we have conceded : but here psychology 

 helps us out. As I have already said, these qualities are very largely educeable, 

 and even induceable, by adequate training and sufficiently strong motives ; and 

 the possibility of civilisation as distinguished from savagery so largely hinges 

 upon susceptibility to motives and foresight ; and the cultivation of the habit of 

 acting on far-sighted motive instead of on each momentary impulse is so abso- 

 lutely vital to society ; that it is sociologically sound policy, and, therefore, 

 eminently right, to risk offering (biologically) far too much reward than a fraction 

 too little, in order to encourage industry, thrift, forethought, etc. 



We may now seem to have cleared the way a good deal : but really it is 

 doubtful whether to the hottest Collectivist-Socialist the over-rewards of genius 

 and talent — except in such cases of those of a singer or of an advocate making his 

 tens of thousands — cause any serious concern. Numberless men of genius, to 



1 Full allowance of course, being made for, perhaps, many preparatory years 

 during which the individual's reward was small, or nil, or perhaps notably minus. 



