hers, and incapable of flying far in a
different air.

CHAPTER II

RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART

[Sidenote: Utility is ultimately ideal.]

If there were anything wholly instrumental or merely useful its
rationality, such as it was, would be perfectly obvious. Such a thing
would be exhaustively defined by its result and conditioned exclusively
by its expediency. Yet the value of most human arts, mechanical as they
may appear, has a somewhat doubtful and mixed character. Naval
architecture, for instance, serves a clear immediate purpose. Yet to
cross the sea is not an ultimate good, and the ambition or curiosity
that first led man, being a land-animal, to that now vulgar adventure,
has sometimes found moralists to condemn it. A vessel's true excellence
is more deeply conditioned than the ship-wright may imagine when he
prides himself on having made something that will float and go. The best
battle-ship, or racing yacht, or freight steamer, might turn out to be a
worse thing for its specific excellence, if the action it facilitated
proved on the whole maleficent, and if war or racing or trade could be
rightly condemned by a philosopher. The rationality of ship-building has
several sets of conditions: the patron's demands must be first
fulfilled; then the patron's specifications have to be judged by the
purpose he in turn has in mind; this purpose itself has to be justified
by his ideal in life, and finally his ideal by its adequacy to his total
or ultimate nature. Error on any of these planes makes the ultimate
product irrational; and if a finer instinct, even in the midst of
absorbing subsidiary action, warns a man that he is working against his
highest good, his art will lose its savour and its most skilful products
will grow hateful, even to his immediate apprehension, infected as they
will be by the canker of folly.

[Sidenote: Work wasted and chances missed.]

Art thus has its casuistry no less than morals, and philosophers in the
future, if man should at last have ceased to battle with ghosts, might
be called upon to review material civilisation from its beginnings,
testing each complication by its known ultimate fruits and reaching in
this way a purified and organic ideal of human industry, an ideal which
education and political action might help to embody. If nakedness or a
single garment were shown to be wholesomer and more agreeable than
complicated clothes, weavers and tailors might be notably di