his art at best an evil necessity. For the operation is by hypothesis
not its own end; and if the product, needful for some ulterior purpose,
had been found ready made in nature, the other and self-justifying
activities could have gone on unimpeded, without the arrest or
dislocation which is involved in first establishing the needful
conditions for right action. If air had to be manufactured, as dwellings
must be, or breathing to be learned like speech, mankind would start
with an even greater handicap and would never have come within sight of
such goals as it can now pursue. Thus all instrumental and remedial
arts, however indispensable, are pure burdens; and progress consists in
abridging them as much as is possible without contracting the basis for
moral life.

[Sidenote: Servile arts may grow spontaneous or their products may be
renounced.]

This needful abridgment can take place in two directions. The art may
become instinctive, unconscious of the utility that backs it and
conscious only of the solicitation that leads it on. In that measure
human nature is adapted to its conditions; lessons long dictated by
experience are actually learned and become hereditary habits. So
inclination to hunt and fondness for nursing children have passed into
instincts in the human race; and what if it were a forced art would be
servile, by becoming spontaneous has risen to be an ingredient in ideal
life; for sport and maternity are human ideals. In an opposite direction
servile arts may be abridged by a lapse of the demand which required
them. The servile art of vine-dressers, for instance, would meet such a
fate if the course of history, instead of tending to make the vintage an
ideal episode and to create worshippers of Bacchus and Priapus, tended
rather to bring about a distaste for wine and made the whole industry
superfluous. This solution is certainly less happy than the other,
insomuch as it suppresses a function instead of taking it up into
organic life; yet life to be organic has to be exclusive and finite; it
has to work out specific tendencies in a specific environment; and
therefore to surrender a particular impeded impulse may involve a clear
gain, if only a compensating unimpeded good thereby comes to light
elsewhere. If wine disappeared, with all its humane and symbolic
consecrations, that loss might bring an ultimate gain, could some less
treacherous friend of frankness and merriment be thereby brought into
the wor