Now nothing can be so made--to awaken and enlarge the spirit--without some apparent wastefulness of material or of energy. A cathedral will absorb more stone, and the labour of more men’s lives, before it is finished, than a tenement of equal housing capacity which aims only at providing warmth and a cover from the elements. To provide so much joy and enlargement to the human spirit, a kind of waste, upon the material plane, is necessary; and the man without joy or imagination in his composition is likely to say on beholding it: “Why was all this waste made?” Bear in mind this accusation of waste which can constantly be made, from a certain standpoint against all forms of joy evolved by the art of living--possibly against all forms of joy that you can name; for all joy entails an expenditure of energy, and for those who do not realise the value of joy such expenditure must necessarily seem wasteful. But when a man employs hand or brain worthily, straightway he discovers (latent within that connection) the instinct of delight, of ornament. He cannot rejoice in his craftsmanship without wishing to embellish it--to place upon it the expression of the joy which went with the making. All that he does to this end is apparently (from the material point of view) useless; but from the spiritual it is profoundly useful; and from the spirit (and this I think is important) it tends to re-act and kindle the craftsman to finer craftsmanship than if he had worked for utility alone. Now if spirit thus acts on matter--achieving its own well-being only through a certain waste of material, or expenditure of labour upon the lower plane, yet communicating back to matter influences from that state of well-being to which it has thus attained--may it not be that waste of a certain kind (what I would call “selective waste” _versus_ “haphazard waste”) is the concomitant not only of spiritual but of material growth also? May it not be that evolution has followed upon a course of waste deliberately willed and insisted on--and that without such waste, life--even material life--had not evolved to its present stage?