e read
have lost something of the charm of the illuminated manuscript; our
compositors and linotypers, it may be, have forgotten something of the
piety and devotion of the mediaeval scribe and copyist. So everywhere in
industry the machine depreciates and pushes out the skilled artisan and
craftsman, summoning into his place the hired operative whose business
is to feed and serve instead of to conceive and execute. For cheapness
and abundance, for convenience of repair and replacement we everywhere
sacrifice something of artistic quality in the instrumentalities of life
and action and something of freedom and self-expression in the
processes of manufacture. Thus again, to change the venue, there are
those who miss in democratic government or in an ethical type of
religion the poignant and exalting spiritual quality of devotion to a
personal sovereign or a personal God. Whatever one's judgment may be in
particular cases, there can be no reason for disputing that in
epigenetic or creative evolution there is, in a sense, loss as well as
gain. There is no more reason for supposing that all that was wholesome
or ennobling or beautiful in an earlier function _must_ somehow have its
specific compensation in kind infallibly present in the new than for
supposing that all that is desirable in the new must surely have been
present discernibly or indiscernibly in the old.

If we are on the whole satisfied with the new on its intrinsic merits as
a present complex fact, we have therein sufficient ground for saying
that it marks a stage in progress. This, in fact, is what such a
proposition means. And the old then appears more or less widely
discontinuous with the new--not merely that it shows, in units of
measure, less of the acceptable quality or qualities which the _new_
fact or situation is found to possess, but that it belongs for us to a
qualitatively different level and order of existence. How, we wonder,
could our ancestors have found life tolerable in their undrained and
imperfectly heated dwellings, without the telephone, the morning's news
of the world by cable, and the phonograph? How, again, could feudal
homage and fealty have ever been the foundation of social order in
countries where today every elector is wont to think and to act in his
public relations no longer as a subject but as a citizen. And how, in
still a different sphere, could the father or the mother of a happy
family of children ever have found the freedom