Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/259

Rh and eventually food production by synthetic chemistry in the broader classifications, of house building, of useful clothing, of hygiene, etc. These arts are known in varying degrees of detail to some members of the society.

There may be two specific arts known at a given time useful for the accomplishing of the same result. We are apt to find that art in current exercise which accomplishes the result with the smaller cost of production. It is wonderful to contemplate how very closely cost of production has been studied at all times. In the same classifications, one art successively displaces another on the basis of reduction of cost of production or saving of human effort.

But the art is very different from a material thing. The art is immaterial and useful. Wealth is commonly defined as material and useful. The art as well as the object of wealth may be possessed. The value of wealth, of the material things which are useful, is the shadow of the force of the arts, the immaterial things which create value. We must distinguish sharply some of the characteristics of the arts. Napoleon once said: "But you can not outnumber the one brain."

In a great problem, a thousand ordinary brains put to work on the same problem can not be added together. The results of all this mediocre thinking will not surpass the products of the brain of a Newton, a La Place, or a Napoleon. There is a degree or quality which can not be gained at random by addition. In the mental tug-of-war, it is true that we can not outnumber the one brain. The art is the product of the "one brain," i. e., of the brain of a quality or degree slightly superior to the brains around it. We, therefore, note that a superior brain is a treasure for the community, provided the brain is put to work to solve the problems of the present life.

Now, Professor Karl Pearson and Sir Francis Galton are wont to define the exceptional man as one in a certain proportion of the population. It is assumed that in a strain of the population, there is the " one brain " in a hundred, in a thousand, in a million and in a hundred million of persons, of increasing quality for each classification. Around the lives of the " one brains " are gathered the essential narrative of the history of their times.

But, our first theorem is that the value of an art or of an invention, measured in a saving or a lessening of the previous cost of production, is theoretically commensurable, and that this value for the same new art varies with the population. In other words, the greater the population at a given time, when a new art is discovered, the greater will be the value of the art. If an art, say the invention of the sewing machine in the clothing trade, is equal to saving two dollars per capita per annum net over previous outlay, after making due allowance for new capital invested in the machine, etc., the value of the new art is plainly the