In this connection we must mention the waste of time over what Arnold called “instrument knowledge.”  Years are spent by most upper-class boys and girls in half-learning several languages which they will never use, in acquiring the technique of the piano, or of some other art which they will never learn to practice with proficiency.  There is, to be sure, a certain mental training in all this, but no more than can be found in more useful studies.  A foreign language is essentially a tool for carrying on conversation with its users, or for utilizing the literature written therein; the technique of an art is a tool for producing or copying beautiful forms of that art.  And except as these tools are actually so utilized, the time spent on learning to handle them might better be otherwise occupied.

(2) More than this, cultural interests may fritter away in passive and useless thrills the emotions and energies that ought to stimulate moral and practical activity.  It is so easy, where there is money enough to live on, to let one’s faculties become absorbed in the fascinations of study, without applying it to practice; to enjoy the relatively complete attainment possible in the fine arts, and keep out of the dust and chaos and ugliness of real life.  Or, when the student or art-lover does return to realities, after his absorption in some dream-world, there is danger that he carry over into actual moral situations his habit of passive contemplation, that he be content to remain a spectator instead of plunging in and taking sides.  He has learned to enjoy the spectacle-sin, suffering, and all-and lost the primitive reaction of protest against evils, of practical response to needs, and the impulse to realize ideals in conduct.  Thus culture and art may relax human energy or scatter it in trivial accomplishments; the dilettante spends his days in dreaming rather than in doing. [Footnote:  Cf.  William James, Psychology, vol.  I, pp. 125-26:  “Every time a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.  There is no more contemptible type of human] Footnote continued from Page 269 [character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. . . .  The habit of excessive novel reading and theater going will produce true monsters in this line.  The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.  Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character.  One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass