[75] All that I have said in the beginning as to the relation of the finite and the infinite belongs under this head.
[76] There is one point too obvious to be overlooked, but perhaps it had better be expressly mentioned. The scientist helps us to build our world, the physical nest in which we live, first by mastering nature’s procedures, then by making possible inventions, which increase the security of our footing in the physical world; dispense us from the brute task of pitting our merely physical strength against the forces of nature; render communication between distant peoples feasible, and thereby lay the first foundation for an international society.
[77] Vide Introduction to the First Book.
[78] The vocational group must be independent because the expert familiar with the conditions under which a service is performed is specially competent to decide on the improvements required to render the conditions more favorable to the development of human nature, the service more adequate. The representatives of the collective community, that is of the inexpert, outside mass (inexpert in respect to this particular service) can never perform the same office.
With regard to the present state of industry the gigantic obstacle in the way of improvement is obviously the subjection of the man to the machine. The great hardship which the millions of factory operatives suffer is not only the insufficient wage, it is the depersonalizing effect produced by the substitution of the machine for the hand and the blind subjection of adult workers to the arbitrary will of superiors. (Compare what I have said on this subject in the chapter on “An Ethical Programme of Social Reform” in The World Crisis.)
[79] Think of Mommsen, the author of a thousand treatises, whose knowledge of the facts of Roman history was unsurpassed and probably unequalled. Yet is his judgment on Cæsar or Cæsarism helpful as an ethical appraisement?
[80] Aristotle regards the Œdipus Rex as the most perfect example of tragedy; let it serve the purpose of illustrating the idea here proposed. Read the play and get the total impression of it. Analyze it into its parts. Synthesize after the analysis. You will not fail to realize how every character, every speech and act, contributes to the total effect, and how in turn every single factor in the play receives a new significance from its relation to the rest, while still retaining its obvious meaning (the meaning it would have when taken out of the context of the play). Take the first speech of Œdipus as an example. He is the king solicitous for the welfare of his subjects, to whom they look up with admiration and gratitude. He is the father of his people. Read this speech again after you have taken in the entire play, and note how its color is changed. How the firmness, the fatherly, protective attitude is now seen to be the outward mask of a fugitive soul, unsure of itself, haunted by hideous fears.
[81] The use made of pageantry, the revival of English and other folk-songs, the morris-dances and the like, the attempt to ennoble the leisure of the industrial workers by leading them back to forms of art which sprang up centuries ago in foreign countries, is evidence of the keen desire for art rather than a step in a new direction.
[82] Art, like science, is to be subordinate. The relation between persons and persons is mankind’s supreme concern. The views above expressed differ radically from those of Schiller. See his Æsthetic Education of Man.
[83] Compare with the spiritual conception of culture here outlined Matthew Arnold’s “knowing the best which has been thought and said”; and a recent definition of culture by an eminent American as “the knowing one thing well and a little of everything else,” without correlation of the little one knows of everything else with the one thing one is supposed to know extremely well.