Political Ideals | Page 2

the food and clothing
of another; if the supply is insufficient, what one man has is obtained at the expense of
some other man. This applies to material goods generally, and therefore to the greater
part of the present economic life of the world. On the other hand, mental and spiritual
goods do not belong to one man to the exclusion of another. If one man knows a science,
that does not prevent others from knowing it; on the contrary, it helps them to acquire the
knowledge. If one man is a great artist or poet, that does not prevent others from painting
pictures or writing poems, but helps to create the atmosphere in which such things are
possible. If one man is full of good-will toward others, that does not mean that there is
less good-will to be shared among the rest; the more good-will one man has, the more he
is likely to create among others. In such matters there is no possession, because there is
not a definite amount to be shared; any increase anywhere tends to produce an increase
everywhere.
There are two kinds of impulses, corresponding to the two kinds of goods. There are
possessive impulses, which aim at acquiring or retaining private goods that cannot be
shared; these center in the impulse of property. And there are creative or constructive
impulses, which aim at bringing into the world or making available for use the kind of
goods in which there is no privacy and no possession.
The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the
possessive impulses the smallest. This is no new discovery. The Gospel says: "Take no
thought, saying, What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be
clothed?" The thought we give to these things is taken away from matters of more
importance. And what is worse, the habit of mind engendered by thinking of these things
is a bad one; it leads to competition, envy, domination, cruelty, and almost all the moral
evils that infest the world. In particular, it leads to the predatory use of force. Material
possessions can be taken by force and enjoyed by the robber. Spiritual possessions cannot
be taken in this way. You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or
his thought. You may put a man to death because he loves his fellow-men, but you will
not by so doing acquire the love which made his happiness. Force is impotent in such
matters; it is only as regards material goods that it is effective. For this reason the men
who believe in force are the men whose thoughts and desires are preoccupied with
material goods.
The possessive impulses, when they are strong, infect activities which ought to be purely
creative. A man who has made some valuable discovery may be filled with jealousy of a
rival discoverer. If one man has found a cure for cancer and another has found a cure for
consumption, one of them may be delighted if the other man's discovery turns out a
mistake, instead of regretting the suffering of patients which would otherwise have been
avoided. In such cases, instead of desiring knowledge for its own sake, or for the sake of
its usefulness, a man is desiring it as a means to reputation. Every creative impulse is

shadowed by a possessive impulse; even the aspirant to saintliness may be jealous of the
more successful saint. Most affection is accompanied by some tinge of jealousy, which is
a possessive impulse intruding into the creative region. Worst of all, in this direction, is
the sheer envy of those who have missed everything worth having in life, and who are
instinctively bent on preventing others from enjoying what they have not had. There is
often much of this in the attitude of the old toward the young.
There is in human beings, as in plants and animals, a certain natural impulse of growth,
and this is just as true of mental as of physical development. Physical development is
helped by air and nourishment and exercise, and may be hindered by the sort of treatment
which made Chinese women's feet small. In just the same way mental development may
be helped or hindered by outside influences. The outside influences that help are those
that merely provide encouragement or mental food or opportunities for exercising mental
faculties. The influences that hinder are those that interfere with growth by applying any
kind of force, whether discipline or authority or fear or the tyranny of public opinion or
the necessity of engaging in some totally incongenial occupation. Worst of all influences
are those that thwart or twist a man's fundamental impulse, which is what shows