ARISTOCRACY AND EVOLUTION 



Book IV 

 Chapter 2 



The great 

 wealth-pro- 

 ducers suscep- 

 tible to the 

 motives on 

 which the 

 socialists 

 dwell will 

 desire excep- 

 tional wealth 

 all the more 

 because of 

 them. 



proposition which the socialists set themselves to 

 annihilate. But if, on the other hand, the great 

 wealth-producer is really capable of those higher 

 desires which the socialists assure us will shortly 

 become so strong in him, the desire of exceptional 

 wealth, instead of being superseded by these, will 

 be stronger beyond calculation than it ever could 

 be without them. 



And it is, as a rule, the latter of these two 

 suppositions which practically represents the truth. 

 Exceptional wealth is desired by the men who 

 produce it not for itself, but for its results ; and in 

 proportion as the man who desires it possesses a 

 lofty character, his desire for it, being merged in the 

 thought of the uses to which he desires to put it, 

 will itself become equally lofty also. But none the 

 less will the desire of the material wealth form the 

 physical basis in which his loftier desires inhere, just as 

 the impulse of sex remains the physical basis of the 

 deepest and tenderest love which a man feels for a 

 woman, or as the brain is the physical basis of every 

 thought that a man can think. Thus the arguments 

 of the socialists recoil upon their own heads ; and 

 instead of tending to show that the desire of possess- 

 ing exceptional wealth will ever cease to be indis- 

 pensable as a motive to exceptional production of it, 

 they have merely succeeded in calling attention to 

 the facts on which the indispensable character of 

 this motive depends. 



We have not, however, finished with this ques- 

 tion yet. There is a further set of objections still 



