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