extent, influenced the
sense of beauty and of utility in articles of use or beauty.
Articles are to an extent preferred for use on account of their being
conspicuously wasteful; they are felt to be serviceable somewhat in
proportion as they are wasteful and ill adapted to their ostensible use.

The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the
expensiveness of the articles. A homely illustration will bring out this
dependence. A hand-wrought silver spoon, of a commercial value of some
ten to twenty dollars, is not ordinarily more serviceable--in the first
sense of the word--than a machine-made spoon of the same material.
It may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of some
"base" metal, such as aluminum, the value of which may be no more than
some ten to twenty cents. The former of the two utensils is, in fact,
commonly a less effective contrivance for its ostensible purpose than
the latter. The objection is of course ready to hand that, in taking
this view of the matter, one of the chief uses, if not the chief use,
of the costlier spoon is ignored; the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our
taste, our sense of the beautiful, while that made by machinery out of
the base metal has no useful office beyond a brute efficiency. The facts
are no doubt as the objection states them, but it will be evident
on rejection that the objection is after all more plausible than
conclusive. It appears (1) that while the different materials of which
the two spoons are made each possesses beauty and serviceability for the
purpose for which it is used, the material of the hand-wrought spoon is
some one hundred times more valuable than the baser metal, without very
greatly excelling the latter in intrinsic beauty of grain or color, and
without being in any appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical
serviceability; (2) if a close inspection should show that the supposed
hand-wrought spoon were in reality only a very clever citation of
hand-wrought goods, but an imitation so cleverly wrought as to give the
same impression of line and surface to any but a minute examination by
a trained eye, the utility of the article, including the gratification
which the user derives from its contemplation as an object of beauty,
would immediately decline by some eighty or ninety per cent, or even
more; (3) if the two spoons are, to a fairly close observer, so nearly
identical in appearance that the lighter weight of