The quota of absolute necessities being thus reduced to almost nothing, the quota of superfluities has been able to be extended to almost everything. Since we live on so little, there remains abundant time for thought. A minimum of utilitarian work and a maximum of æsthetic, is surely civilisation itself in its most essential element. The room left vacant in the heart by the reduction of our wants is taken up by the talents--those artistic, poetic, and scientific talents which, as they day by day multiply and take deeper root, become really and truly acquired wants. They really spring, however, from a necessity to produce, and not from a necessity to consume. I underline this difference. The manufacturer is ever toiling, not for his own pleasure nor for that of the world about him, of his fellow-men or his natural rivals, but for a society different from his own--on mutual terms, but that is immaterial. His work, therefore, constitutes a non-social, an almost anti-social relationship with those who are not of his kind, to the great hurt and hindrance of his relations with those who are. The increasing intensity of his work tends to accentuate and not to attenuate the dissimilarities between the different grades of society, which act as an obstacle to the general reunion. We have clearly seen the truth of this in the course of the twentieth century of the ancient era, when the whole population was divided into trades-unions of the different professions, which waged desperate warfare on one another, and whose members in the bosom of each union hated one another as only brothers can. But for the scientist, the artist, the lover of beauty in all its forms, to produce is a passion, to consume is only a taste. For every artist has a dilettante double. But his dilettantism in respect to arts other than his own only plays by comparison a secondary part in his life. The artist creates through sheer delight, and he alone creates for such motives.