Rare manual skill, in short, does not promote progress, or help to maintain civilisation at any {256} given level, unless it can metamorphose itself—as in many cases it can do by means of patterns or otherwise—into a series of orders which men who have less skill can execute, and thus affects commodities not directly, but indirectly. So long as it resides in exertions of the craftsman’s hand, applied directly to each commodity produced, it has on the progress of the arts generally no effect at all. The man or men who invented the slide rest communicated a new power to every one of the innumerable artisans now using it; but an artisan who should produce exceptionally accurate work owing to the exceptional accuracy and steadiness of his own hand, could no more add anything to the faculties of even one of his fellows than a beautiful woman can, by means of her own beauty, improve the eyes, nose, or hair of her plainer sisters. Material progress, then, as has just been said, is so far from being dependent on the growth of rare manual skill that it takes place in proportion as the necessity for such skill is eliminated. And now let us turn from the consideration of human capacities, as applied to and expressing themselves in the production of particular commodities or results, and consider them as they reveal themselves in ordinary life and conversation. We shall find ourselves confronted by a similar set of facts here. We shall see that many of the talents and qualities which, when possessed by our friends or by ourselves, elicit our strongest admiration, and give an interest to human nature, do nothing to {257} advance or to maintain civilisation at all. No one, for example, who knows anything of English society will deny that conversational wit is one of the rarest faculties to be met with in it, and earns for its possessor the reputation of an exceptionally brilliant man; but its possession by one man does not cause its existence in others. The wit leaves the rest of society precisely where he found it. The same is the case with private goodness and wisdom. They may indeed affect an exceedingly small circle, but there is in their influence nothing certain or lasting. The most highly moral parents have often the most dissipated sons; it requires almost as much wisdom to take sound advice as to give it; even if the sensible and the excellent exert a good influence on their own friends, they have no tendency to inaugurate any general moral advance; and a man whose life is rendered interesting by an exceptionally romantic passion may illustrate the capacities of human nature, but he does nothing to expand them.