may well be supposed to find in that thrilling moment a reward sufficient to compensate him for all his pains in arriving at it; and most branches of science would yield us similar illustrations. Indeed, the career characteristic of scientists and philosophers generally is a conclusive proof that the principal motive of their activity is not the desire of any extrinsic reward, the amount of which they will balance against the amount or the quality of their efforts, but a passion for truth as truth, which they indulge in for its own sake only. Now granting all this, what will its bearing be on the question of whether the pleasures of pure self-realisation will suffice to stimulate those {296} exceptional faculties whose function it is to maintain and increase the production of wealth? With regard to artistic creation, we are certainly bound to admit that great works of art are wealth of a highly important kind, and when a good picture is produced, as it often is, solely in obedience to the painter’s artistic impulse, we have a genuine example of wealth produced in obedience to that kind of motive whose efficiency the socialists desire to establish. Further, with regard to the pursuit of truth, as Mill points out in a passage that has been already quoted, progress in speculative knowledge is the basis of all other progress, and notably of progress in the arts and processes of wealth-production. It must, accordingly, be admitted that in a certain sense all progress in wealth-production has for its basis a kind of disinterested activity with which the desire of possessing wealth has nothing at all to do. And yet in spite of this, neither the case of the artist nor of the philosopher warrants the inference that the motives which are sufficient for them will ever have a similar effect on the faculties of the great wealth-producers. The evidence, in fact, as soon as we have fully examined it, will be found to point in a direction precisely opposite.