hat the intricacy of it should be admired than unfolded,
whence a natural distrust of such recommendation may well have place in
the minds of those who have not yet perceived any value in the thing
praised, and because also, men in the present century understand the
word Useful in a strange way, or at least (for the word has been often
so accepted from the beginning of time) since in these days, they act
its more limited meaning farther out, and give to it more practical
weight and authority, it will be well in the outset that I define
exactly what kind of utility I mean to attribute to art, and especially
to that branch of it which is concerned with those impressions of
external beauty whose nature it is our present object to discover.

Sec. 4. Its proper sense.

That is to everything created, pre-eminently useful, which enables it
rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its
Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to man,
it is necessary first to determine the use of man himself.

Man's use and function (and let him who will not grant me this follow me
no farther, for this I purpose always to assume) is to be the witness of
the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience
and resultant happiness.

Whatever enables us to fulfil this function, is in the pure and first
sense of the word useful to us. Pre-eminently therefore whatever sets
the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help us
to exist, are in a secondary and mean sense, useful, or rather, if they
be looked for alone, they are useless and worse, for it would be better
that we should not exist, than that we should guiltily disappoint the
purposes of existence.

Sec. 5. How falsely applied in these times.

And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak from their
hearts, as if houses, and lands, and food, and raiment were alone
useful, and as if sight, thought, and admiration,[2] were all
profitless, so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who
would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into
vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the
meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body, who look to
the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vinedressers and
husbandmen, who love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush,
better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of E