t. But the industrial arts, for the most part,
serve more ultimate purposes. It is imaginable that Nature
might have provided clothing, food, and shelter ready to our
hand. It is questionable whether under such circumstances
men would out of deliberate choice continue industries which
are now made imperative through necessity. The mines and
the stockyards are necessary rather than beautiful or intrinsically
attractive occupations. But in the world of fact, those
things which are necessary to us are not ready to our hand.
Our civilization is predominantly industrial, and must be so,
if the billion and a half inhabitants of our world are to be
maintained by the resources at our command.

Nevertheless despite the absorption of a large proportion of
contemporary society in activities pursued not for their own
sakes, but for the goods which are their fruits, there is still, as
it were, energy left over. This excess vitality may, as it does
for most men, take the form of mere unorganized play or
recreation. But not so for those born with a singular gift for
realizing in color or form or sound the ideal values which they
have imagined. For these "play" is creative production.
The fine arts are, in a sense, the play of the race. They are
the fruits of such energy as is, through some fortunate accident
of temperament or circumstance, not caught up in the
routine and mechanics of industry or the trivialities of sport
or pleasure. They are human activities, freed from the limitations
imposed by the exigencies of practical life, and controlled
only by the artist's imagined visions. Creative activity is
most explicit and most successful in the fine arts, because in
these there are fewer obstacles to the material realization of
imagined perfections. "The liberal arts bring to spiritual
fruition the matter which either nature or industry has prepared
and rendered propitious."

The industrial arts are, as already pointed out, man's
transformation of natural resources to ideal uses. In the same
way political and social organization are human arts, enterprises,
at their best, in the moulding of men's natures to their
highest possible realization. But in the world of action,
whether political or industrial, there are incomparably greater
hindrances to the realization in practice of imagined goods
than there are, at least to the gifted, in the fine arts. Every
ideal for which men attempt to find fulfillment in the world of
action is