This diffused æsthetic sense is correlated with a diffused artistic instinct, based on craftsmanship, which the Greeks were afraid to recognise because they looked down with contempt on the handicrafts as vulgar. William Morris was a pioneer in asserting this association. As a distinguished English writer, Mr. Charles Marriott, the novelist and critic, clearly puts the modern doctrine: “The first step is to absorb, or re-absorb, the ‘Artist’ into the craftsman.... Once agree that the same æsthetic considerations which apply to painting a picture apply, though in a different degree, to painting a door, and you have emancipated labour without any prejudice to the highest meaning of art.... A good surface of paint on a door is as truly an emotional or æsthetic consideration as ‘significant form,’ indeed it _is_ ‘significant form.’” (_Nation and Athenæum_, 1st July, 1922.) Professor Santayana has spoken in the same sense: “In a thoroughly humanised society everything—clothes, speech, manners, government—is a work of art.” (_The Dial_, June, 1922, p. 563.) It is, indeed, the general tendency to-day and is traceable in Croce’s later writings. Footnote 155: Thus it has often been pointed out that the Papuans are artists in design of the first rank, with a finer taste in some matters than the most highly civilised races of Europe. Professor R. Semon, who has some remarks to this effect (_Correspondenzblatt_ of the German Anthropological Society, March, 1902), adds that their unfailing artistic sense is spread throughout the whole population and shown in every object of daily use. Footnote 156: The presence of a small minority of abnormal or perverse persons—there will be such, we may be sure, in every possible society—affords no excuse for restricting the liberty of the many to the standard of the few. The general prevalence of an æsthetic morality in classic times failed to prevent occasional outbursts of morbid sexual impulse in the presence of objects of art, even in temples. We find records of Pygmalionism and allied perversities in Lucian, Athenæus, Pliny, Valerius Maximus. Yet supposing that the Greeks had listened to the proposals of some strayed Puritan visitor, from Britain or New England, to abolish nude statues, or suppose that Plato, who wished to do away with imaginative literature as liable to demoralise, had possessed the influence he desired, how infinite the loss to all mankind! In modern Europe we not only propose such legal abolition; we actually, however in vain, carry it out. We seek to reduce all human existence to absurdity. It is, at the best, unnecessary, for we may be sure that, in spite of our efforts, a certain amount of absurdity will always remain. Footnote 157: A. M. Carr-Saunders, _The Population Problem: A Study in Human Evolution_ (Oxford Press, 1922). Footnote 158: