absence of cumulative achievement in
experience, on the personal side, and idle display, parasitic dependence
upon the others, on the social side. Occupation is a concrete term for
continuity. It includes the development of artistic capacity of any
kind, of special scientific ability, of effective citizenship, as well
as professional and business occupations, to say nothing of mechanical
labor or engagement in gainful pursuits.

We must avoid not only limitation of conception of vocation to the
occupations where immediately tangible commodities are produced, but
also the notion that vocations are distributed in an exclusive way, one
and only one to each person. Such restricted specialism is impossible;
nothing could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an
eye to only one line of activity. In the first place, each individual
has of necessity a variety of callings, in each of which he should be
intelligently effective; and in the second place any one occupation
loses its meaning and becomes a routine keeping busy at something in the
degree in which it is isolated from other interests. (i) No one is
just an artist and nothing else, and in so far as one approximates that
condition, he is so much the less developed human being; he is a kind
of monstrosity. He must, at some period of his life, be a member of
a family; he must have friends and companions; he must either support
himself or be supported by others, and thus he has a business career.
He is a member of some organized political unit, and so on. We naturally
name his vocation from that one of the callings which distinguishes him,
rather than from those which he has in common with all others. But we
should not allow ourselves to be so subject to words as to ignore and
virtually deny his other callings when it comes to a consideration of
the vocational phases of education.

(ii) As a man's vocation as artist is but the emphatically specialized
phase of his diverse and variegated vocational activities, so his
efficiency in it, in the humane sense of efficiency, is determined by
its association with other callings. A person must have experience,
he must live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical
accomplishment. He cannot find the subject matter of his artistic
activity within his art; this must be an expression of what he suffers
and enjoys in other relationships--a thing which depends in turn upon
the alertness and sympathy of his interests