III. THE USEFUL HAND

III. THE USEFUL HAND

“The earth is preeminently their abode; they can see nothing beyond the social life of man; they know no more of the world of ideas than what the naked eye can know of heaven. Beyond this, they are always ready to deny all that they cannot feel or understand, and to look upon the limits of their understanding as the limits of nature;

Even in literature, what of ideality these Useful Hands can comprehend stops short at a very narrow limit. They keep away from idealism just as they do from boldness of thought or novelty of font.
‘Their tastes are in the direction of moral, political, social, and philosophical sciences; didactic, analytic and dramatic poetry; grammar, form, language, logic mathematics, love of literary exactitude, meter, rhythm, symmetry and arrangement, strictly defined and conventional art. Their views of things are just rather than wide; they have great commercial talent; they have positive but moderate ideas, with the instinct of duty and of the respect due to authority, of die cultivation of practical truth and of good behavior, with a, strong paternal instinct; in fact, generally speaking, having more brains than heart, they prefer what they discover to what they imagine.