deas follows by
easy consequence. The demands of reputability in this way coalesce in
the popular apprehension with the demands of the sense of beauty, and
beauty which is not accompanied by the accredited marks of good repute
is not accepted. But the requirements of pecuniary reputability and
those of beauty in the naive sense do not in any appreciable degree
coincide. The elimination from our surroundings of the pecuniarily
unfit, therefore, results in a more or less thorough elimination of that
considerable range of elements of beauty which do not happen to conform
to the pecuniary requirement. The underlying norms of taste are of very
ancient growth, probably far antedating the advent of the pecuniary
institutions that are here under discussion. Consequently, by force of
the past selective adaptation of men's habits of thought, it happens
that the requirements of beauty, simply, are for the most part best
satisfied by inexpensive contrivances and structures which in a
straightforward manner suggest both the office which they are to perform
and the method of serving their end. It may be in place to recall the
modern psychological position. Beauty of form seems to be a question of
facility of apperception. The proposition could perhaps safely be made
broader than this. If abstraction is made from association, suggestion,
and "expression," classed as elements of beauty, then beauty in any
perceived object means that the mid readily unfolds its apperceptive
activity in the directions which the object in question affords. But the
directions in which activity readily unfolds or expresses itself are the
directions to which long and close habituation has made the mind prone.
So far as concerns the essential elements of beauty, this habituation
is an habituation so close and long as to have induced not only a
proclivity to the apperceptive form in question, but an adaptation of
physiological structure and function as well. So far as the economic
interest enters into the constitution of beauty, it enters as a
suggestion or expression of adequacy to a purpose, a manifest and
readily inferable subservience to the life process. This expression of
economic facility or economic serviceability in any object--what may
be called the economic beauty of the object-is best sewed by neat and
unambiguous suggestion of its office and its efficiency for the material
ends of life.

On this ground, among objects of use the simple and unadorne