it is cut loose from these practical needs that Art is herself
and comes to her own. This does not mean that the jugs or tables are to
be bad jugs or tables, still less does it mean that the jugs or tables
should be covered with senseless machine-made ornament; but the utility
of the jug or table is a good in itself independent of, though often
associated with, its merit as art.

No one has, I think, ever called Art "the handmaid of Science." There
is, indeed, no need to establish a hierarchy. Yet in a sense the
converse is true and Science is the handmaid of Art. Art is only
practicable as we have seen, when it is possible safely to cut off
motor-reactions. By the long discipline of ritual man accustomed himself
to slacken his hold on action, and be content with a shadowy counterfeit
practice. Then last, when through knowledge he was relieved from the
need of immediate reaction to imminent realities, he loosed hold for a
moment altogether, and was free to look, and art was born. He can never
quit his hold for long; but it would seem that, as science advances and
life gets easier and easier, safer and safer, he may loose his hold for
longer spaces. Man subdues the world about him first by force and then
by reason; and when the material world is mastered and lies at his beck,
he needs brute force no longer, and needs reason no more to make tools
for conquest. He is free to think for thought's sake, he may trust
intuition once again, and above all dare to lose himself in
contemplation, dare to be more and more an artist. Only here there lurks
an almost ironical danger. Emotion towards life is the primary stuff of
which art is made; there might be a shortage of this very emotional
stuff of which art herself is ultimately compacted.

Science, then, helps to make art possible by making life safer and
easier, it "makes straight in the desert a highway for our God." But
only rarely and with special limitations easily understood does it
provide actual material for art. Science deals with abstractions,
concepts, class names, made by the intellect for convenience, that we
may handle life on the side desirable to us. When we classify things,
give them class-names, we simply mean that we note for convenience that
certain actually existing objects have similar qualities, a fact it is
convenient for us to know and register. These class-names being
_abstract_--that is, bundles of qualities rent away from living actual
objects, do no