he study of many schools of art may
become an obstacle to proficiency in any.

_Utility the principle of organization in nature._

Sec. 38. Utility (or, as it is now called, adaptation, and natural
selection) organizes the material world into definite species and
individuals. Only certain aggregations of matter are in equilibrium
with the prevailing forces of the environment. Gravity, for instance,
is in itself a chaotic force; it pulls all particles indiscriminately
together without reference to the wholes into which the human eye
may have grouped them. But the result is not chaos, because matter
arranged in some ways is welded together by the very tendency
which disintegrates it when arranged in other forms. These forms,
selected by their congruity with gravity, are therefore fixed in
nature, and become types. Thus the weight of the stones keeps the
pyramid standing: here a certain shape has become a guarantee of
permanence in the presence of a force in itself mechanical and
undiscriminating. It is the utility of the pyramidal form -- its fitness
to stand -- that has made it a type in building. The Egyptians
merely repeated a process that they might have observed going on
of itself in nature, who builds a pyramid in every hill, not indeed
because she wishes to, or because pyramids are in any way an
object of her action, but because she has no force which can easily
dislodge matter that finds itself in that shape.

Such an accidental stability of structure is, in this moving world, a
sufficient principle of permanence and individuality. The same
mechanical principles, in more complex applications, insure the
persistence of animal forms and prevent any permanent deviation
from them. What is called the principle of self-preservation, and
the final causes and substantial forms of the Aristotelian
philosophy, are descriptions of the result of this operation. The
tendency of everything to maintain and propagate its nature is
simply the inertia of a stable juxtaposition of elements, which are
not enough disturbed by ordinary accidents to lose their
equilibrium; while the incidence of a too great disturbance causes
that disruption we call death, or that variation of type, which, on
account of its incapacity to establish itself permanently, we call
abnormal.

Nature thus organizes herself into recognizable species; and the
aesthetic eye, studying her forms, tends, as we have already shown,
to bring the type within even n