Page:Copyright, Its History And Its Law (1912).djvu/35

 of right, and without stamping on it any marks of ownership; it being then a present to the public, like building a church or bridge, or laying out a new highway."

There is nothing which may more rightfully be called property than the creation of the individual brain. For property (from the Latin proprius, own) means a man's very own, and there is nothing more his own than the thought, created, made out of no material thing (unless the nerve-food which the brain consumes in the act of thinking be so counted), which uses material things only for its record or manifestation. The best proof of own-ership is that if this individual man or woman had not thought this individual thought, realized in writing or in music or in marble, it would not exist. Or if the individual thinking it had put it aside without such record, it would not, in any practical sense, exist. We cannot know what "might have beens" of untold value have been lost to the world where thinkers, such as inventors, have had no inducement or opportunity thus to materialize their thoughts.

It is sometimes said, as a bar to this idea of property, that no thought is new—that every thinker is dependent upon the gifts of nature and the thoughts of other thinkers before him, as every tiller of the soil is dependent upon the land as given by nature and improved by the men who have toiled and tilled before him,—a view of which Henry C. Carey has been the chief exponent in this country. But there is no real analogy—aside from the question whether the denial of individual property in land would not be setting back the hands of progress. If Farmer Jones does not raise potatoes from a piece of land, Farmer Smith can; but Shakespeare cannot write "Paradise lost" nor Milton "Much ado," though before both