294 ARISTOCRA C Y AND E VOL UTION 



Book iv tends to divert men's attention from them. And with 

 regard to the works of mercy something similar 

 must be said also ; for though they undoubtedly 

 have a close connection with wealth, they do not 

 aid at its production, still less at its increase, but 

 merely at the distribution of portions of it, which have 

 been produced already, amongst persons whom it 

 would otherwise not reach. The love for others, for 

 example, by which works of mercy are motived, may 

 prompt a man to send London children for a holiday 

 into the country by train, but it would never have 

 prompted him to invent the locomotive engine. It 

 may prompt him to secure for a youth an education in 

 but neither of modern science, but it would never have prompted 



these is the , . . . 



same thing as him to write the treatises ot rrotessor Huxley. All 

 tlon. 1 activity of this kind, then, whatever form it may take, 

 is, in a sociological sense, essentially parasitic. It 

 implies the previous exercise of another set of 

 faculties totally distinct from those directly implied 

 in itself, and, together with other faculties, other 

 motives belonging to them. It has, then, with the 

 actual process of wealth-production as little to do 

 as has religious propagandism itself; and, like reli- 

 gious propagandism, we may dismiss it from our con- 

 sideration here. The only forms of activity with 

 which we are called on to deal with here will thus 

 be artistic creation, the pursuit of speculative truth, 

 and military or quasi-military feats of heroism, 

 it is a motive As to artistic creation, it is, no doubt, perfectly 



to artistic pro- 

 duction, true, as is proved by the efforts of countless de- 

 voted amateurs, that men with artistic powers will 



