Now, at the same time, to go back once more into that dim past, when
ethics and religion, manual art and scientific thought, found expression
in the crudest form of myths, the æsthetic sense was germinating
likewise. Away back in the glacial period you find pictures drawn and
scratched upon the reindeer's antler, portraitures of mammoths and
primitive pictures of the chase; you see the trinkets, the personal
decorations, proving beyond question that the æsthetic sense was there.
There has been an immense æsthetic development since then. And I believe
that in the future it is going to mean far more to us than we have yet
begun to realize. I refer to the kind of training that comes to mankind
through direct operation upon his environment, the incarnation of his
thought, the putting of his ideas into new material relations. This is
going to exert powerful effects of a civilizing kind. There is something
strongly educational and disciplinary in the mere dealing with matter,
whether it be in the manual training-school, whether it be in
carpentry, in overcoming the inherent and total depravity of inanimate
things, shaping them to your will, and also in learning to subject
yourself to their will (for sometimes you must do that in order to
achieve your conquests; in other words, you must humour their habits and
proclivities). In all this there is a priceless discipline, moral as
well as mental, let alone the fact that, in whatever kind of artistic
work a man does, he is doing that which in the very working has in it an
element of something outside of egoism; even if he is doing it for
motives not very altruistic, he is working toward a result the end of
which is the gratification or the benefit of other persons than himself;
he is working toward some result which in a measure depends upon their
approval, and to that extent tends to bring him into closer relations to
his fellow man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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