86 



ARISTOCRACY AND EVOLUTION 



Book I 

 Chapter 3 



He defends 

 patents be- 

 cause they 

 represent the 

 very substance 

 of the inven- 

 tor s own 

 mind ; 



answer, and one taken from himself, is still in 

 reserve an answer which clenches the whole 

 matter, and shows us that Mr. Spencer, in his 

 dealings with practical life, really recognises great 

 men as exercising in the arts of peace precisely the 

 same kind of causality which Napoleon exercised 

 in war. 



Let us turn to Mr. Spencer's treatise on Social 

 Statics, and to the section of it in which he treats 

 of patents or as he himself describes them, "the 

 rights of property in ideas." He begins by com- 

 plaining that the right of patenting "inventions, 

 patterns, or designs " is not recognised as being 

 based on any moral right at all, but is generally 

 regarded as a kind of "privilege" or "reward" 

 " The prevalence of such a belief" says Mr. Spencer, 

 " is by no means creditable to the national conscience. 

 . . . To think" he exclaims, "that a sinecurist 

 should be held to have a ' vested interest ' in his office, 

 and a just title to compensation if it is abolished ; and 

 yet that an invention over which no end of mental toil 

 has been spent, and on which the poor mechanic has 

 laid out perhaps his last sixpence an invention which 

 he has completed entirely by his own labour and with 

 his own materials has wrought, as it were, out of 

 the very substance of his own mind should not be 

 acknowledged as his property ! " 



Social Statics is one of Mr. Spencer's earlier 

 works. Let us now consult his latest, the third and 

 final volume of his Principles of Sociology ; and 

 here we shall find this same admission that the 



