ts, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture,
as thought, or idea, Athene-like, are complete, finished, revelations
of wisdom at once. Not so the mechanical arts and sciences: they are
arts of growth; they are shaped and formed gradually, (and that, more
by a blind sort of guessing than by intuition,) and take many men's
lives to win even to one true principle. On all sides they are the
exact opposites of each other; for, in the former, the principles
from the first are mature, and only the manipulation immature; in the
latter, it is the principles that are almost always immature, and the
manipulation as constantly mature. The fine arts are always grounded
upon truth; the mechanical arts and sciences almost always upon
hypothesis; the first are unconfined, infinite, immaterial,
impossible of reduction into formulas, or of conversion into
machines; the last are limited, finite, material, can be uttered
through formulas, worked by arithmetic, tabulated and seen in
machines.

_Sophon._ Kosmon, you see that Kalon, true to his nature, prefers the
beautiful and good, to the good without the beautiful; and you, who
love nature, and regard all that she, and what man from her, can
produce, with equal delight,--true to your's,--cannot perceive
wherefore he limits genius to the fine arts. Let me show you why
Kalon's ideas are truer than yours. You say that chemistry,
steam-power, and the electric telegraph, are more radically
civilizers than poetry, painting, or music: but bethink you: what
emotions beyond the common and selfish ones of wonder and fear do the
mechanical arts or sciences excite, or communicate? what pity, or
love, or other holy and unselfish desires and aspirations, do they
elicit? Inert of themselves in all teachable things, they are the
agents only whereby teachable things,--the charities, sympathies and
love,--may be more swiftly and more certainly conveyed and diffused:
and beyond diffusing media the mechanical arts or sciences cannot
get; for they are merely simple facts; nothing more: they cannot
induct; for they, in or of themselves, have no inductive powers, and
their office is confined to that of carrying and spreading abroad the
powers which do induct; which powers make a full, complete, and
visible existence only in the fine arts. In FACT and THOUGHT we have
the whole question of superiority decided. Fact is merely physical
record: Thought is the application of that record to something
_hum