minished in
number. If, in another quarter, popular fancy should sicken at last of
its traditional round of games and fictions, it might discover infinite
entertainment in the play of reality and truth, and infinite novelties
to be created by fruitful labour; so that many a pleasure might be found
which is now clogged by mere apathy and unintelligence. Human genius,
like a foolish Endymion, lies fast asleep amid its opportunities,
wasting itself in dreams and disinheriting itself by negligence.

[Sidenote: Ideals must be interpreted, not prescribed.]

Descriptive economy, however, will have to make great progress before
the concrete ethics of art can be properly composed. History, conceived
hitherto as a barbarous romance, does not furnish sufficient data by
which the happiness of life under various conditions may be soberly
estimated. Politics has receded into the region of blind impulse and
factional interests, and would need to be reconstituted before it could
approach again that scientific problem which Socrates and his great
disciples would have wished it to solve. Meantime it may not be
premature to say something about another factor in practical philosophy,
namely, the ultimate interests by which industrial arts and their
products have to be estimated. Even before we know the exact effects of
an institution we can fix to some extent the purposes which, in order to
be beneficent, it will have to subserve, although in truth such
antecedent fixing of aims cannot go far, seeing that every operation
reacts on the organ that executes it, thereby modifying the ideal
involved. Doubtless the most industrial people would still wish to be
happy and might accordingly lay down certain principles which its
industry should never transgress, as for instance that production should
at any price leave room for liberty, leisure, beauty, and a spirit of
general co-operation and goodwill. But a people once having become
industrial will hardly be happy if sent back to Arcadia; it will have
formed busy habits which it cannot relax without tedium; it will have
developed a restlessness and avidity which will crave matter, like any
other kind of hunger. Every experiment in living qualifies the initial
possibilities of life, and the moralist would reckon without his host if
he did not allow for the change which forced exercise makes in instinct,
adjusting it more or less to extant conditions originally, perhaps,
unwelcome. It is too late f