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not in invidious contradistinction to the innocent arts regarded as useless, but in emphatic definition of themselves as the indispensable arts of life. Men must use them. They may or may not use the others. The Utilitarian Arts thus bear the same relation to the Fine Arts, as affecting our individual condition, which the root, stem, and leaves of a plant, bear to its flower and fruit. The three first are essential to the existence of the plant, and are more or less active throughout its entire life; the flower (including the fruit) is a rare ornament, appearing only at long intervals, sometimes but once in a hundred years. But the flower, when it does come, repays the long waiting, and the fruit in its bosom, is welcome to all. A year without roses may not blacken the bills of mortality, as a year without potatoes does, but the rose, nevertheless, is a useful plant as well as the potato. And so, there is no antagonism in respect of utility, between the Fine Arts and the Industrial Arts. The former are the useful Æsthetic Arts; the latter the useful Œconomic Arts. We concede to the former the special title of Fine or Noble Arts, because their ends are high, their students are few, and excellence in them is rare; and we acknowledge the latter to be Common Arts, whose ends are humble, whose students are countless, and excellence in which is, in many respects, universal. We have few great artists; we have many skilful artizans.
But, though the industrial arts are common, they are not ignoble arts. They minister, indeed, to those physical wants which we share with the lower animals, but we are raised above them as much by being industrial, as by being æsthetic artists. We are the former in virtue of our superior intellect, as we are the latter in virtue of our superior imagination.
Let me ask your attention to this point. I do not wish unwisely to magnify mine office. It is with every-day life, and every-day cares, that Technology, in one aspect, has to do; with man, not as "a little lower than the angels," but "as crushed before the moth," and weaker than the weakest of the beasts that perish; with man as a hungry, thirsty, restless, quarrelsome, naked animal. But it is also the province of Technology to show, that man, because he is this, and just because he is this, is raised by the industrial conquests which he is compelled to achieve, to a place of power and dignity, separating him by an absolutely immeasurable interval from every other animal.
It might appear, at first sight, as if it were not so. As industrial
