merely the present moment to
consider. He is a being possessed of intelligence and will, powers which
demand and necessitate their own constant activity. Instinct, the gift
of brute creation, ensures the preservation of life by its blind
preparation for the morrow. Man has no such ready-made and spontaneous
faculty. His powers depend for their effectiveness on their deliberative
and strenuous exertions. And because life is a sacred thing, a lamp of
which the once extinguished light cannot be here re-enkindled, it
carries with it, when it is intelligent and volitional, the duty of
self-preservation. Accordingly the human animal is bound by the law of
his own being to provide against the necessities of the future. He has,
therefore, the right to acquire not merely what will suffice for the
instant, but to look forward and arrange against the time when his power
of work shall have lessened, or the objects which suffice for his
personal needs become scarcer or more difficult of attainment. Property,
therefore, of some kind or other, says Aquinas, is required by the very
nature of man. Individual possessions are not a mere adventitious luxury
which time has accustomed him to imagine as something he can hardly do
without, nor are they the result of civilised culture, which by the law
of its own development creates fresh needs for each fresh demand
supplied; but in some form or other they are an absolute and dire
necessity, without which life could not be lived at all. Not simply for
his "well-being," but for his very existence, man finds them to be a
sacred need. Thus as they follow directly from the nature of creation,
we can term them "natural."

St. Thomas then proceeds in his second article to enter into the
question of the rights of private property. The logical result of his
previous argument is only to affirm the need man has of some property;
the practice of actually dividing goods among individuals requires
further elaboration if it is to be reasonably defended. Man must have
the use of the fruits of the earth, but why these rather than those
should belong to him is an entirely different problem. It is the problem
of Socialism. For every socialist must demand for each member of the
human race the right to some possessions, food and other such
necessities. But why he should have this particular thing, and why that
other thing should belong to someone else, is the question which lies at
the basis of all attempts to pre