60 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



I. 



The commonest fact of human consciousness is the existence of 

 the vital wants, hunger, thirst, and the desire of proper warmth. 

 These act as a steady force compelling men to the efforts to secure 

 their gratification. Out of these powerful and persistent appetites, 

 spring through the slow round of the ages, what we call the useful 

 arts, the food-producing, the cloth or clothes-making and the build- 

 ing arts ; and ancillary to these, the arts of the tool-maker and 

 machinist, and of those who collect, prepare or transport materials 

 for the others. As the satisfaction of these wants is the vital con- 

 dition of human existence, so these arts are the broadest funda- 

 mental element of external civilization. They uphold and help on 

 all the others; and their advancement at once measures and pro- 

 motes the social progress of which they are most prominent factors. 



The vital wants of mankind are at first merely animal, and are 

 as simple as they are savage ; but they steadily multiply, diversify, 

 and refine with every advance in man's intellectual and social de- 

 velopment, till they mingle and interlock with all the higher desires 

 and artistic tastes of civilized men. Keeping pace with these, the 

 rude efforts, scarcely to be called arts, which supply the low needs 

 of the wild man, divide and differentiate into all the innumerable 

 industries of the highest sociologic condition. Thus the craving of 

 a present hunger which drives the savage to the chase widens out 

 into the prudent care for all future hungers, and the food-producing 

 arts grow with the variations of soil and climate into the enormous 

 reach of agricultural industries and the hundred commercial, manu- 

 facturing, chemic, and cooking arts till farms, forests, orchards, 

 gardens, and breeding waters, with mills, and manufactories, cover 

 the continents with their costly array to satisfy the needs of civilized 

 society. 



So also the shivering desire for shelter and clothing which the 

 savage satisfies with the tanned skin of his game, and with the cave, 

 hut, wigwam or tent, grows into that broad economy with builds 

 houses, palaces, and cities, and evolves the great family of building 

 arts which occupy and enrich so many thousands of mankind. 



But however vast and varied these useful arts they all look back 

 to the vital wants as their source and spring ; and as these wants 

 are persistent, and press always with resistless force, the resulting 

 phenomena must constitute a universal and essential element in all 

 civilizations. 



