hall see there by mentioning that among the motives which are in the
socialistic future to replace, among able men, the desire of economic
gain, one of the chief is to be the desire of moral approbation. Unless
a man's actions, whether industrial or moral, are to be treated as his
own, instead of being attributed to his conditions, he would have as
little right to the praise which it is proposed to give him as he would
have to the dollars which it is proposed to take away.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] I first made this criticism of Spencer in my work _Aristocracy and
Evolution_. On that occasion Mr. Spencer wrote to me, complaining with
much vehemence that I had misrepresented him; and he repeated the
substance of his letter in a subsequent published essay. My criticism
dealt, and could have dealt only, not with what he meant, but what he
said; and certainly in his language--and, as I think, in his own
mind--there was a constant confusion between the two truths in question.
Apart, however, from what he considered to be my own misrepresentation
of himself, he declared that he entirely agreed with me; and that "great
men" must, for practical purposes, be regarded as the true causes of
such changes as they initiate.

CHAPTER IX

THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY, CONTINUED.
ABILITY AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE

The fact that the speculative arguments which we have just now been
discussing are not only irrelevant to the problem of the able man and
his motives, but are tacitly abandoned as being so by the very men who
have urged them, when they come to deal specifically with that problem
themselves, may suggest to some readers that so long a discussion of
them was superfluous. But though the socialists abandon them at the very
moment when, if ever, they ought to be susceptible of some definite
application, they abandon them quite unconsciously, and still continue
to attach to them some solemn importance. Such being the case, then, the
more futile these arguments are the stronger is the light thrown by them
on the peculiar intellectual weakness which distinguishes even the most
capable of those who think it worth their while to employ them. For this
reason, therefore, if for no other, our examination of them will have
proved useful, for it will have prepared us to encounter a weakness of
precisely the same kind in the reasonings of the socialists when they
deal with motive directly.

Let us once more state this direct problem of motive, as