314 THE HUMAN FORM. 



It is further to be observed, that impersonality is human, jus 

 like personality, the latter being the skin of which the former k 

 the substance (pp. 285, 288) \ a substance however which is no 

 substance without that skin to hold it. For the best things in us 

 are impersonal, and the more they are, the better persons we be- 

 come (p. 285). Upon this principle, physical as well as moral, 

 the impersonal in nature communes with a proportionate impersonal 

 in ourselves (p. 285). 



We have already trenched somewhat upon the other side of this 

 question, namely, the relation of the arts to the human form, and 

 we have hinted that poetry, painting and sculpture always act per- 

 sonally and dramatically with their highest subjects, which are the 

 human actions and passions (p. 305). A Michael Angelo uses no 

 theory, and makes no apology, when he throngs his Sistine Chapel 

 with glorious human forms as the attributes of God and man : the 

 admiring sea of ages of hearts and heads underneath him, finds 

 no fault with such impersonations. But art extends far below these 

 regions ; and as we have noticed throughout, there is an art in science 

 itself, which blindly musters its kingdoms under the human form. 

 The useful arts again, the sisters of the material or culinary sciences, 

 aim to reconstitute nature into human images closer and more com- 

 modious than at first. The mission of these arts consists in mak- 

 ing nature into the wraith and image of history. For this purpose 

 the world underground is a mine ; its iron must not lie waste in 

 those old lockers of the veins, but it is drawn into rails, girders, 

 ribs of ships, stalwart engines and vertebral bridges; and the 

 nations look on their continents as worms full of this metal silk, out c. 

 whose bellies untold glancing cities shall be spun. The geologies of 

 the arts are new strata above-ground, inhabited tier after tier by the 

 centuries; so that nature, besides the Plutonic and diluvian, includes 

 also the humanitary formations, and is never natural until she en- 

 velopes all the arts in marriage with all the natures. The mission of 

 the husbandman and the cultivator of stock adds new varieties to exist- 

 ing species of animals and plants, and nature embraces the new with 

 the old in a tighter maternity than at first : her grandmotherly love in- 

 creases with posterity, and ascends hotter and brighter to her children's 

 children. In a word, use and cultivation by humanity are accepted 



