plane of activity. The
enrichment and enlargement of human life in such a society would
undoubtedly manifest itself in a greater likeness between the
individual members in the lower modes of life, but the extent of
individual difference in the higher modes would be ever widening. The
object of the levelling in the lower processes of life would be that
higher individual differences might have opportunity to assert
themselves. In a progressive society thus conceived, where
socialisation and individuation grow inseparably related and reacting
on one another, there is evidently no fixed limit to the progress of
machinery. As each higher want is educated, some lower want will drop
into the position of a routine-want, and will pass into the rightful
province of machinery. But though a large proportion of material
commodities would doubtless be made by machinery, it is not signified
that art will be banished from what are commonly called the industrial
arts. On the contrary, art may be in many ways the friend and
co-operator of machinery, the latter furnishing a routine foundation
for the display of individual taste and of individual satisfaction in
the consumer. One of the most hopeful signs of the last few years is
the growing intrusion of art into the machine-industries,--the
employment of skilled designers and executants who shall tempt and
educate the public eye with grace of form and harmony of colour. In
pottery, textile wares, hardware, furniture, and many other
industries, the beginnings of public taste are operating in demand for
variety and ornament. May not this be the beginning of a cultivation
of individual taste which shall graft a fine-art upon each
machine-industry, apportioning to machinery that work which is hard,
dull, dangerous, monotonous, and uneducative, while that which is
pleasant, worthy, interesting, and educative is reserved for the human
agent?

Sec. 12. Machinery is thus naturally adapted to the satisfaction of the
routine wants of life under social control. The character of
machine-production, as has been shown, is essentially collective. The
maladies of present machine-industries are due to the fact that this
collective character is inadequately recognised, and machinery, left
to individual enterprise and competition, oppresses mankind and causes
waste and commercial instability. In a word, the highest division of
labour has not been yet attained, that which will apportion machinery
to the c