It is an exercise of control and coercion over the population from which the class draws its sustenance.

This discipline, as well as the incidents of practice which give it its content, therefore has some attraction for the class apart from all questions of cognition.

All this holds true wherever and so long as the governmental office continues, in form or in substance, to be a proprietary office; and it holds true beyond that limit, in so far as the tradition of the more archaic phase of governmental evolution has lasted on into the later life of those modern communities for whom proprietary government by a leisure class is now beginning to pass away.
For that field of learning within which the cognitive or intellectual interest is dominant--the sciences properly so called--the case is somewhat different, not only as regards the attitude of the leisure class, but as regards the whole drift of the pecuniary culture.
Knowledge for its own sake, the exercise of the faculty of comprehensive without ulterior purpose, should, it might be expected, be sought by men whom no urgent material interest diverts from such a quest.

The sheltered industrial position of the leisure class should give free play to the cognitive interest in members of this class, and we should consequently have, as many writers confidently find that we do have, a very large proportion of scholars, scientists, savants derived from this class and deriving their incentive to scientific investigation and speculation from the discipline of a life of leisure.

Some such result is to be looked for, but there are features of the leisure-class scheme of life, already sufficiently dwelt upon, which go to divert the intellectual interest of this class to other subjects than that causal sequence in phenomena which makes the content of the sciences.