Kosmon. Human genius! why not?  Are they not equally human?—­nay, are they not—­especially steam-power, chemistry and the electric telegraph—­more—­eminently more—­useful to man, more radically civilizers, than music, poetry, painting, sculpture, or architecture?

Kalon. Stay, Kosmon! whither do you hurry?  Between chemistry and the mechanical arts and sciences, and between poetry, painting, and music, there exists the whole totality of genius—­of genius as distinguished from talent and industry.  To be useful alone is not to be great:  plus only is plus, and the sum is minus something and plus in nothing if the most unimaginable particle only be absent.  The fine arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture, as thought, or idea, Athene-like, are complete, finished, revelations of wisdom at once.  Not so the mechanical arts and sciences:  they are arts of growth; they are shaped and formed gradually, (and that, more by a blind sort of guessing than by intuition,) and take many men’s lives to win even to one true principle.  On all sides they are the exact opposites of each other; for, in the former, the principles from the first are mature, and only the manipulation immature; in the latter, it is the principles that are almost always immature, and the manipulation as constantly mature.  The fine arts are always grounded upon truth; the mechanical arts and sciences almost always upon hypothesis; the first are unconfined, infinite, immaterial, impossible of reduction into formulas, or of conversion into machines; the last are limited, finite, material, can be uttered through formulas, worked by arithmetic, tabulated and seen in machines.

Sophon. Kosmon, you see that Kalon, true to his nature, prefers the beautiful and good, to the good without the beautiful; and you, who love nature, and regard all that she, and what man from her, can produce, with equal delight,—­true to your’s,—­cannot perceive wherefore he limits genius to the fine arts.  Let me show you why Kalon’s ideas are truer than yours.  You say that chemistry, steam-power, and the electric telegraph, are more radically civilizers than poetry, painting, or music:  but bethink you:  what emotions beyond the common and selfish ones of wonder and fear do the mechanical arts or sciences excite, or communicate? what pity, or love, or other holy and unselfish desires and aspirations, do they elicit?  Inert of themselves in all teachable things, they are the agents only whereby teachable things,—­the charities, sympathies and love,—­may be more swiftly and more certainly conveyed and diffused:  and beyond diffusing media the mechanical arts or sciences cannot get; for they are merely simple facts; nothing more:  they cannot induct; for they, in or of themselves, have no inductive powers, and their office is confined to that of carrying and spreading abroad the powers which do induct; which powers make a full,