same time. Only superstition makes us believe that the
two are necessarily hostile so that a subject is illiberal because it
is useful and cultural because it is useless. It will generally be found
that instruction which, in aiming at utilitarian results, sacrifices the
development of imagination, the refining of taste and the deepening of
intellectual insight--surely cultural values--also in the same degree
renders what is learned limited in its use. Not that it makes it
wholly unavailable but that its applicability is restricted to routine
activities carried on under the supervision of others. Narrow modes of
skill cannot be made useful beyond themselves; any mode of skill which
is achieved with deepening of knowledge and perfecting of judgment is
readily put to use in new situations and is under personal control. It
was not the bare fact of social and economic utility which made certain
activities seem servile to the Greeks but the fact that the activities
directly connected with getting a livelihood were not, in their days,
the expression of a trained intelligence nor carried on because of a
personal appreciation of their meaning. So far as farming and the trades
were rule-of-thumb occupations and so far as they were engaged in for
results external to the minds of agricultural laborers and mechanics,
they were illiberal--but only so far. The intellectual and social
context has now changed. The elements in industry due to mere custom and
routine have become subordinate in most economic callings to elements
derived from scientific inquiry. The most important occupations of today
represent and depend upon applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
The area of the human world influenced by economic production
and influencing consumption has been so indefinitely widened that
geographical and political considerations of an almost infinitely wide
scope enter in. It was natural for Plato to deprecate the learning of
geometry and arithmetic for practical ends, because as matter of fact
the practical uses to which they were put were few, lacking in content
and mostly mercenary in quality. But as their social uses have increased
and enlarged, their liberalizing or "intellectual" value and their
practical value approach the same limit.

Doubtless the factor which chiefly prevents our full recognition and
employment of this identification is the conditions under which so much
work is still carried on. The invention of machines