de possible the whole modern world of electric
transportation, air travel between two continents, and
instantaneous communication between remote parts of the
world, have proved the aphorism. Man since his origin
has tried to control his environment for his own good. The
cave and the flint were his first rude attempts. In science
with its accurate observation of facts not apparent to the
unaided eye, and its discovery and demonstration of laws not
found by casual and unsystematic common sense, man has an
incomparably more refined instrument, and an incomparably
more effective one. Thus, paradoxically enough, man's most
disinterested and impartial activity is at the same time his
most practical asset.

THE CREATION OF BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS AND THE EXPRESSION OF
IDEAS AND FEELINGS IN BEAUTIFUL FORM. Most men spend most
of their lives necessarily in practical activity. Man's particular
equipment of instincts survived in "the struggle for existence"
precisely because they were practical, because they did
help the human creature to maintain his equilibrium in a
half-friendly, half-hostile environment. Man acquires also,
as already has been pointed out, habits that are useful to him,
that bring him satisfactions not attainable through the random
instinctive responses which are his at birth. Reflection,
too, is, for the most part, severely practical in its origins and
its responsibilities. It guides action into economical and useful
channels.

Most of man's actions are thus ways of modifying his environment
for immediately practical purposes. Man has instincts
and habits which enable him to live. But in making
those changes in the world which enable him to live better,
man, as it were by accident, makes them beautifully. Pottery
begins, for example, as a practical art, but the skilled
potter cannot help spending a little excess vitality and habitual
skill in adding a quite unnecessarily graceful curve, a
gratuitous decoration to the utilitarian vessel he is making.
In the words of Santayana, "What had to be done was, by
imaginative races, done imaginatively; what had to be spoken
or made was spoken or made fitly, lovingly, beautifully....
The ceaseless experimentation and fermentation of ideas, in
breeding what it had a propensity to breed, came sometimes
on figments that gave it delightful pause."[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Reason in Art_, p. 16.]

These accidental graces that man makes in the instinctive
and habitual