Exceptional potentialities can be called out and realised only by a kind of action which is the very antithesis of coercion, and which is analogous to that of sunshine on buds, or flowers or {283} fruits—namely, the penetrating, the warming, the stimulating action of the hope of certain personal advantages on the mind of the exceptional man, which advantages he will not only covet as advantageous, but will recognise as the natural result of the exercise of his exceptional faculties, and as a result attainable by the exercise of these faculties only. What these personal advantages are, the desire of which, coupled with their attainability, is necessary to stimulate men who have more than ordinary potentialities, to do greater things by developing them than are done by ordinary men, must be determined by reference to the actual facts of life, the records of which are ample, and the details of which, though numerous, can by careful analysis be easily reduced to order. {284} CHAPTER II THE MOTIVES OF THE EXCEPTIONAL WEALTH-PRODUCER In spite of their frequent forgetfulness of the fact just insisted on, that the development and exercise of exceptional faculties can be secured only through the influence of some exceptional motive, this is not a fact which socialists theoretically deny. On the contrary, often as they forget it, with curious consequences to their reasoning, yet just as often, when they happen to be directly confronted with it, they are loud in declaring that they recognise it quite as clearly as their opponents; and a considerable portion of their more modern writings consists of a setting forth of the various exceptional rewards which will, according to them, in the socialistic State, elicit from exceptional men the exercise of their utmost powers. Moreover, the rewards on which the socialists principally insist are rewards, the desire of which is admitted by all parties to be an actual force in society as at present constituted, and in fact to have been, ever since the dawn of history, the motive to which much activity of the highest kind {285} has been due. These rewards have been defined in a recent _Handbook of Socialism_ as the pleasure of “_excelling_,” “_the joy in creative work_,” the satisfaction which work for others brings to “_the instincts of benevolence_,” and, lastly, “_social approval_,” or the homage which is called “_honour_.”