total depravity of inanimate things, shaping them to your will, and
also in learning to subject yourself to their will (for sometimes
you must do that in order to achieve your conquests; in other
words, you must humour their habits and proclivities). In all this
there is a priceless discipline, moral as well as mental, let alone
the fact that, in whatever kind of artistic work a man does, he is
doing that which in the very working has in it an element of
something outside of egoism; even if he is doing it for motives not
very altruistic, he is working toward a result the end of which is
the gratification or the benefit of other persons than himself; he
is working toward some result which in a measure depends upon their
approval, and to that extent tends to bring him into closer
relations to his fellow man.

In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past,
crude labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances. The kind
of labour which can command its price is the kind which has trained
intelligence behind it. One of the great needs of our time is the
multiplication of skilled and special labour. The demand for the
products of intelligence is far greater than that for mere crude
products of labour, and it will be more and more so. For there
comes a time when the latter products have satisfied the limit to
which a man can consume food and drink and shelter,--those things
which merely keep the animal alive. But to those things which
minister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man, there
is almost no limit. The demand one can conceive is well-nigh
infinite. One of the philosophical things that have been said, in
discriminating man from the lower animals, is that he is the one
creature who is never satisfied. It is well for him that he is so,
that there is always something more for which he craves. To my