_ 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.
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