There is another contrast between construction and decoration. The constructive is the social element in the product of human labour; the decorative the individual one. I do not think that this dictum needs an elaborate explanation; it seems clear enough to me. In construction expression is given to a need which is, at a given time and in a given place, shared by many or all; it answers not only a condition, but a demand of the community. Decoration is—at any rate originally—the outcome of individual taste and individual imaginative power. Construction is a thing necessitated, and therefore _banal_; decoration is superfluous, and therefore charming. The former appeals to the understanding; the latter is fantastic and sentimental. The human consciousness is, however, so arranged that—for its gain? for its loss? (I have treated this question so often and so thoroughly in other places that I may here leave it undiscussed)—it derives its feelings of pleasure and aversion incomparably more from its sensuous than from its intellectual life. Wherefore, for practical purpose in style, only those who are most highly developed intellectually have appreciation; on the other hand, for what is pleasing, all whose nervous system is susceptible to pleasurable feelings. An individual decorative invention becomes style by the imitation of others, which can be slavish or free. A single work, a single artist, will never be felt as a phenomenon of style. There is the same difference between originality and style as between the picture of a certain person and the composite or average photograph of Galton. The feature of family likeness that runs through the works of one period and one place, however, like that which all members of a blood-relationship exhibit, is explained most simply through descent from a common ancestor. Decoration is either organic or transferred. The former is the outgrowth of construction, and gives it a new meaning, unites to the idea of its purpose a simile that can be correct or false, pleasant or silly; the latter is added externally, and only aims at the beautification of the surface, without adopting living and necessary relations to the structure and destination of the object. Surface decoration may be pretty and rich, but it is always something subordinate, and always speaks of poor imagination and slight inventive power. Organic decoration is alone the outcome of a creative gift for art. The psychical mechanism, which produces organic decoration, is always the same; it is the co-operation of association of ideas and anthropomorphism. I know very well that this latter is only a particular instance of the former; but I cite the really identical, nevertheless, as two apparently different ideas, so as not to become vague through too wide generalisation.