Thomas Hobbes has always been thought of as the arch materialist, the first man to uphold go-getting as a creed. But that is a travesty of Hobbes's opinion. He was a go-getter in a sense, but it was the going, not the getting he extolled. The race had no finishing post as Hobbes conceived it. The great thing about the race was to be in it, to be a contestant in the attempt to make the world a better place, and it was a spiritual death he had in mind when he said that to forsake the course is to die. 'There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here,' he told us in Leviathan, 'because life itself is but a motion and can never be without desire, or without fear, no more than without sense'; 'there can be no contentment but in proceeding.' I agree. Peter Medawar, The Effecting of All Things Possible