is the true antithesis of machinery. The essence of art in this wide
sense is the application of individual spontaneous human effort. Each
art-product is the repository of individual thought, feeling, effort,
each machine-product is not. The "art" in machine-work has been
exhausted in the single supreme effort of planning the machine; the
more perfect the machine the smaller the proportion of individual
skill or art embodied in the machine-product The spirit of machinery,
its vast rapid power of multiplying quantities of material goods of
the same pattern, has so over-awed the industrial world that the craze
for quantitative consumption has seized possession of many whose taste
and education might have enabled them to offer resistance. Thus, not
only our bread and our boots are made by machinery, but many of the
very things we misname "art-products." Now a just indictment of this
excessive encroachment of machinery is not based upon the belief,
right or wrong, that machinery cannot produce things in themselves as
fit or beautiful as art. The true inadequacy of machine-products for
human purposes arises from the fact that machine-products are exactly
similar to one another, whereas consumers are not. So long as
consumers consent to sink their individuality, to consume articles of
precisely the same shape, size, colour, material, to assimilate their
consumption to one another, machinery will supply them. But since no
two individuals are precisely similar in physical, intellectual, or
moral nature, so the real needs of no two will be the same, even in
the satisfaction of ordinary material wants. As the dominance of
machinery over the workers tends to the destruction of individuality
in work, obliging different workers to do the same work in the same
way with a premium upon the mere capacity of rapid repetition, in the
same way it tends to crush the individuality of consumers by imposing
a common character upon their consumption. The progressive utilisation
of machinery depends upon the continuance of this indiscriminate
consumption, and the willingness of consumers to employ every increase
of income in demanding larger and larger quantities of goods of the
same pattern and character. Once suppose that consumers refuse to
conform to a common standard, and insist more and more upon a
consumption adjusted to their individual needs and tastes, and
likewise strive to follow and to satisfy the changing phases of their
individual