nishing returns. So long as we
continue to raise more men who demand more food and clothes and fuel,
we are subject to the limitations of the material universe, and what
we get ever costs us more and benefits us less. But when we cease to
demand more, and begin to demand better, commodities, more delicate,
highly finished and harmonious, we can increase the enjoyment without
adding to the cost or exhausting the store. What artist would not
laugh at the suggestion that the materials of his art, his colours,
clay, marble, or what else he wrought in, might fail and his art come
to an end? When we are dealing with qualitative, _i.e._ artistic,
goods, we see at once how an infinite expenditure of labour may be
given, an infinite satisfaction taken, from the meagrest quantity of
matter and space. In proportion as a community comes to substitute a
qualitative for a quantitative standard of living, it escapes the
limitations imposed by matter upon man. Art knows no restrictions of
space or size, and in proportion as we attain the art of living we
shall be likewise free.

Sec. 15. So far the consideration of reformed qualitative consumption has
been confined to material goods. But a people moving along the line of
progress, seeking ever a more highly qualitative life, will demand
that a larger proportion of their energy shall be given to the
production and consumption of intellectual goods.

This world likewise is at present largely under the dominion of
Machinery and a Law of Diminishing Returns. By making of our
intellectual life a mere accumulation of knowledge, piling fact upon
fact, reading book upon book, adding science to science, striving to
cover as much intellectual ground as possible, we become mere
worshippers of quantity. It is not unnatural that our commercial life
should breed such an intellectual consumption, and that the English
and American nations in particular, who have beyond others developed
machine-production and the quantitative genius for commerce, should
exhibit the same taste in their pursuit after knowledge. Pace, size,
number, cost, are ever on their lips. To visit every European capital
in a fortnight, see acres of pictures, cathedrals, ruined castles,
collect out of books or travel the largest mass of unassorted and
undigested information, is the object of such portion of the
commercial life as can be spared from the more serious occupations of
life, piling up bale after bale of cotton goods and