ollective supply of the routine needs of life, and art to the
individual supply of the individual needs. In this way alone can
society obtain the full use of the "labour-saving" character of
machinery, minimising the amount of human exertion engaged in tending
machinery and maximising the amount engaged in the free and
interesting occupations. Engaged in satisfying the steady, constant
needs of society under social regulation, machinery would no longer be
subject to those fearful oscillations of demand which are liable
unforeseen to plunge whole masses of workers into unemployment and
poverty, and to waste an infinite amount of "saving." Where the
fluctuations in consumption were confined to the region of individual
taste, the changes of taste and growing variety of consumption would
furnish the education of the artist, who will acquire skill and
flexibility by freely following and directing the changing tastes of
consumers.

In such a forecast it is of course useless to endeavour to predict
how far art will continue to occupy itself with industry, or how far,
set free by machinery, it will be absorbed in the creation of finer
intellectual or spiritual products, or in what are now termed the fine
arts. This must depend upon the nature of the harmonious development
of human capacities of effort and enjoyment under conditions of
individual freedom, and the interaction of the free development of
individuals in a society founded upon an equality of the material
means of life. The study of the qualitative development of consumption
in modern society is only just beginning to be recognised as the true
starting-point of economic science, for although many of the older
economists did verbal homage to the importance of this branch of
study, it has been reserved for recent thinkers to set about the
work.[291]

Sec. 13. It is hardly too much to say that the whole of social progress
depends upon the substitution of qualitative for quantitative methods
of consumption. In so far as individuals apply their growing ability
to consume in order to demand increased quantities of the same
articles they consumed before, or flash variety of fashionable goods
in no wise adjusted to individual need or taste, they extend the
dominion of machinery. In so far as they develop individual taste,
delicacy rather than quantity of satisfaction, they give wider scope
to work which embodies conscious human skill and deserves the name of
art.

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