So the froth of a Futurist at the mere sight of a Vickers’ biplane is the same as a foaming ode to the dragon-fly or the seagull; not for any super-mechanical attribute of the fly or the bird, but simply because one is a flying insect and the other a bird. And this all-inclusiveness of the direction of our thought is the result, primarily, of the all-inclusiveness of our knowledge. The “gothic” stonemason, whose acquaintance with other forms of art than those he practised was no doubt relatively nil, was better off than we are. Similarly, the Modern Man, the abstraction that we all go to make, in absorbing the universe of beings unto himself and his immediate life as we have seen him, with his mechanical inventions, commencing to do, is equally in the position of the dilettante. What is his synthesis going to be? So far it has been endless imitation; he has done nothing with his machinery but that. Will he arrive where there is no power, enjoyment or organisation of which other living beings have been capable of which he will not, in his turn, and by a huge mechanical effort, possess the means? If he is amused enough with his mind to give that carte blanche, his individual existence as an ape-like animal will grow less and less important. As already his body in no way indicates the scope of his personal existence (as the bear’s or the barnacle’s indicates theirs) it cannot any more in pictorial art be used as his effective delimitation or sign. But that is not to say that a piece of cheese or a coal scuttle can. There is in the inorganic world an organism that is his: and which, as much as his partially superseded body, is in a position of mastery and higher significance over the cheese and saucepan. _Fashion_