550 TECHNOLOGY 



to be reinforced by the widespread existence of intellectual tastes, 

 and because the patient waiting on nature, often so necessary in 

 scientific work, tends to produce self-restraint. To self-restraint 

 and true temperance we must look to save our civilization from 

 passing into rottenness, as has been the fate of many another, 

 which, dahlia-like, has blossomed only to turn into a sodden mass, 

 because, perhaps, it has not recognized the truth that it is of no 

 use at all to refine the vices of the state, that the plow, which 

 uproots the evil weeds without mercy, must prepare the way for 

 the waving grain and the fruitful harvest of a true civilization. 

 We might go on we might call attention to the self-sacrifice 

 which often leads the man of pure science and surely, not seldom, 

 the true technologist, to count his life well lost in the service of 

 truth. Nor in this busy practical age must we forget that, if we 

 choose, we can make each obstacle overcome, not a step from which, 

 like a child in play, we can leap back to our former position, but 

 a point of vantage from which we can scale, 



" By slow degrees, by more and more, 

 The cloudy summits of our time." 



There is one subject on which I should like to say a word, one 

 that is generally used as a contrast to technology, namely, "fine 

 art," or the science of beauty, the beautiful being regarded as 

 the antithesis of the useful. I cannot feel content so to express 

 the relation between the two. 



Have we not already noticed that the inspiration of genius, no 

 less in science than in art, requires the imagination as its instru- 

 ment, and can only express itself in terms of its language? Also, 

 has not one of the greatest writers on the science of the beautiful 

 called our attention to the fact that beauty without strength and 

 truth is a sham? No, there can be here no true antithesis. The 

 power of seeing the abstract must be much the same mental power, 

 to whatever subject it is applied, and whether it discovers ideal 

 truth or ideal beauty, it matters little; the great thing is to feel 

 the Soul of things at all, and not to be only capable of seeing with 

 a surface realism which thinks nothing worth discussing unless it can 

 be handled. 



In practice, however, we still find a difficulty. In the early stages 

 of technological education, drawing is recognized to be the foun- 

 dation of the industrial as well as of the fine arts, but later, an ap- 

 parently inevitable specialization differentiates between the two, 

 and, except in the one department of architecture, beauty and the 

 science of beauty have been largely ignored by the new education. 



Is it really necessary to be ugly in order to be useful? Can we not 

 lift and store our grain without disfiguring our most beautiful 



