FROM CHOICE TO HABIT 145 



higher responses. It is not merely because we are 

 relieved of decision about manipulation that would 

 otherwise check our advance, that as speech, draughts- 

 manship, or reckoning become easily performed, that 

 therefore language, art, and astronomy have become 

 a more perfect expression of the universe. The un- 

 burdening transfer from act of choice to act of drill 

 and from the strain of memory to the habit of tradition 

 allows not only further advance to be made, but 

 preserves the past and forms when complexity has 

 been gained a point of departure for responses to 

 messages which before were too high for us to in- 

 terpret or hear. These messages, coming either from 

 within or from without, are no new things, but, like 

 the pulses that beat upon us all day long, were un- 

 perceived till the insistent voices of needs were stilled 

 and we became attuned to a more receptive pitch of 

 nervous strain. Thus upon the solid groundwork of 

 embodied and self-contained, self-regulating tradition 

 the needs of maintenance are satisfied, leaving us free, 

 not to sink into the torpor of automatism, but to 

 respond to finer impulses which the cares of main- 

 tenance had hidden. The needy artist must first 

 make his bread and then practise his art ; and the 

 making of bread creates the necessary organic pre- 

 paration for aesthetic perception and work. Even 

 so the classes of animals richest in manual work 

 and tradition are alone they which have aesthetic 

 preceptions. 



' For to him that hath shall be given.' 



L 



