To the Editor of Liberty:

What is an idea? Is it made of wood, or iron, or stone? Possibly of paper? Is it animate or inanimate? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

Do you see what I am trying to get at? An idea is nothing objective. It is neither produced nor discovered; neither a product of industry, nor unclaimed land, nor a fera naturæ.

Ambiguously as the word has been used, both by metaphysicians and in common talk, every shade of meaning given to it has been but a variation upon one fundamental sense; that an idea is, after some fashion, an intellectual process.

That is to say, the idea is not any part of the product; it is a part of the producer, or, if you will, a part of the labor of producing.

Ideas are not—cannot be—produced. They grow. Given heredity, education, circumstances, and the rest of the environment, and that the man’s ideas will be so and so, whether he builds, or talks, or writes, is determined.

Moreover, there is no reason why we should confine the word idea to a mental process so striking in size or quality as to seem to us out of the common. Every act springs from some corresponding idea.

The copyist expresses ideas as truly as does the author. Ideas of arrangement, ideas of appropriate text, script, or engrossing hand; all the ideas which mark the grades of excellence in copyists.

Each one, having used as much thought as the work in hand requires, be it steam-engine-construction or philosophy-writing, has also used a complementary amount of physical exertion; and as a result of his labor he possesses his engine or his manuscript.

Either one he may now destroy, or conceal, or sell.

If he sells, the value is determined for the purchaser largely by the amount of advantageous novelty contained, or, as we metaphorically call it, by the idea embodied in it. But the idea is not any more the thing sold in the case of a book than it is in the case of a horse-shoe.

In either case the man who has the best ideas produces the best work, and every labor product, in that sense, embodies the ideas of the producer, just as it embodies his physical exertion.

The idea is the intellectual exertion made in producing, and, as such, is a part of the body of the producer. The working of the mind cannot be sold; only the material of nature, transformed by labor, whether mental or physical, can be dealt in commercially.

Consequently the ideas, the mental processes, like the physical processes, of each one are hise own to use as he pleases. If he uses them to labor, the product of his labor is still his.

It is vain to talk of protecting property in ideas as far as he in whom the ideas originate is concerned. He holds his ideas by the same title he holds his body, wherever chattel slavery is not admitted.

The only legitimate use of ideas is to produce something desirable and therefore exchangeable, be it song, speech, plough, or book. After the product has been exchanged, the producer has nothing more to do with it.

What is really sought by patent and copyright laws is indicated in the very word copyright. Not to protect ideas, but to confer the privilege of copying a material product.

It is not in the interest of the poor devils, the author and inventor, but in that of the capitalist and publisher, that they are enacted.

They seek to erect another species of legal property, necessarily and avowedly involving monopoly, ostensibly in the interest of the producer, really in that of the investor and exploiter.

As for the compensation of authors, why should they not be able to get as good compensation for the out-and-out sale of their labor as anybody else can? When liberty to labor exists, there is no doubt that they will be able.

Nor need the publishers fear liberty.

It is only the excessive pressure of the present slavery that makes it worth anybody’s while to shove worthless, copyrighted books, as a venture, upon an overstocked market.

When we can all of us freely satisfy our desires for books, it will be quite as much as publishers can do to keep up with the demand for new authors, without troubling themselves to run competitors out of the trade.

John Beverley Robinson.

67 Liberty St., New york, April 23, 1891.