The Extensive Influence of the Beauty From Utility

¹ Utility is one of the principal sources of beauty.

A house’s convenience gives regular pleasure to the spectator. He is as much hurt when he sees its inconvenience, such as:

• windows of different shapes, or
• the door in a wrong place.

The fitness of any system or machine for its intended purpose gives a beauty on the whole. It renders its very thought agreeable.

² David Hume has recently answered most deeply, clearly, and elegantly why utility pleases. According to him, any object’s utility pleases the master by perpetually suggesting the pleasure or convenience that it aims to promote.

Everytime he looks at it, he remembers this pleasure. The object becomes a source of perpetual satisfaction and enjoyment. The spectator:

• enters into his master’s feelings through sympathy, and
• views the object under the same agreeable aspect

When we visit the palaces of the great, we feel our satisfaction as if we ourselves were the owners.

In the same way, the appearance of inconvenience renders any object disagreeable to the owner and the spectator.

³ But no one has noticed that this fitness is often more valued than its intended purpose.

The exact adjustment of the means for attaining any convenience or pleasure is frequently more regarded than that very convenience or pleasure itself.

The attainment of such pleasure seems to justify the means.

⁴ When a man finds the chairs disordered in room, he gets angry with his servant. He takes the trouble to set them all in their proper places.

The propriety of his action comes from the superior convenience of having the room orderly.

• To attain this convenience, he voluntarily puts himself to more trouble than what the disorder could have caused.

It is easier to sit down on the misplaced chairs.

• After he arranges them, he will probably disarrange one to sit down on it anyway.

Therefore, he wanted more of the arrangement of things which promotes the convenience, than the convenience itself. Yet it is this convenience which:

• ultimately recommends that arrangement, and
• gives it propriety and beauty.

⁵ In the same way, a watch that falls behind two minutes per day is despised by a watch-lover. He sells it for two guineas and buys another at 50 which will not lose more than a minute in a fortnight.

However, the sole use of watches is to tell us the time to prevent us from breaking any engagement.

But the watch-lover will not be more punctual than other men. What interests him is the perfection of the watch, not the knowledge of the time.

⁶ How many people ruin themselves by spending money on trinkets of frivolous utility?

Toy lovers are pleased with the aptness of toys to promote utility, and not the utility.

• They have their pockets stuffed with little conveniences and baubles.
• Their whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing their burden.

⁷ This is not limited to frivolous objects. It also manifests as the most serious and important pursuits of life.

⁸ The poor man’s ambitous son admires the condition of the rich.

• He finds his father’s cottage to be too small.
  • He fancies that he should live with more ease in a palace.
• He is displeased by walking on foot or by riding on horseback.
  • He sees his superiors carried about in machines.
  • He imagines that he could travel with less inconvenience like them.
• He feels naturally indolent.
  • He thinks that having many servants would save him from a lot of trouble.

He thinks that if he had attained all these, he would be contented and happy. He is enchanted with this distant happiness.

To arrive at it, he devotes himself to the pursuit of wealth and greatness forever.

• He submits himself to more fatigue and mental stress in his first month, than he could have suffered in his whole life if he did not aim for it.
• He studies to distinguish himself in some laborious profession and then bring his talents into public view

• He solicits every employment opportunity.
• He serves those whom he hates.

He pursues a fake repose which he might never have.

• He sacrifices a real tranquility that he had originally
• If he attains this repose in old age, he will find it was not better to that humble security and contentment which he abandoned for it

In the end, he finds that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility. He discovers this when he is in the last dregs of life, when:

• his body is wasted with toil and diseases,
• his mind is annoyed by the memory of a thousand injuries and disappointments which he imagines from=
  • his enemies’ injustice
  • his friends’ ingratitude

Wealth provides ease for the body or peace for the mind just as the tweezer-cases of toy lovers do. Like tweezer-cases, wealth and greatness are more troublesome to the person who carries them, than all the convenience they can afford.

The only real difference is that the conveniences of wealth are more observable than those of trinkets.

The palaces, gardens, equipage, and the retinue of the great have the obvious convenience which strikes everybody.

• By sympathy [aethereal relativity], we enjoy and applaud the satisfaction they bring their master.

But the curiosity of a toothpick, ear-picker, nail-cutter, or any other trinket, is not so obvious.

• Their convenience might be equally great, but it is not so striking.
• We do not so readily enter into the satisfaction of the man who has them.
• They therefore are less reasonable subjects of vanity than the magnificence of wealth and greatness.

This is the sole advantage of wealth and greatness. They more effectively gratify that love of distinction so natural to man.

A person living alone in a desolate island might be unsure whether a palace or a collection trinkets would contribute most to his happiness and enjoyment.

• But if he lives in society, there can be no comparison.
• Because in this, as in all other cases, we constantly pay more regard to the spectator’s feelings of him than to his own feelings.

We consider more how he will appear to other people than to himself. The spectator admires the rich not so much because of their pleasure, but because they have more means to get such pleasure. His admiration mainly comes from the ingenious adjustment of those means.

But in disease and old age, the pleasures of vain people disappear. The vain man then curses his ambition which led him to sacrifice his health.

Power and riches then become what they really are: enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body. These conveniences consist of delicate springs which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention.

Despite of all our care, they are ready at any moment to=

• burst into pieces, and
• crush their unfortunate possessor in their ruins.

They are immense fabrics which require a lifelong labour to raise. Every moment, they threaten to overwhelm the person that dwells in them.

• They may save him from some smaller inconveniences.
• But they cannot protect him from the more severe inclemencies of the season.
• They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm.
• They leave him always as much exposed than before, sometimes even more, to=
  • anxiety and fear, and
  • sorrow to diseases, danger, and death.

⁹ In time of sickness or low spirits, this spiteful philosophy is familiar to everyone. It entirely depreciates those great objects of human desire. In pain and sorrow, our imagination seems confined and cooped up within our own persons.

But in times of ease, health, and prosperity, our imagination expands itself to everything around us. We are then charmed with the beauty in the palaces and the economy of the great.

But if we consider the real satisfaction that they bring by themselves, separated from the beauty of its arrangement, it will always appear most contemptible and trifling.

But we rarely view it in this abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confuse their satisfaction with the order of the system, machine, or economy which produces it.

In this complex view, the pleasures of wealth and greatness strike the imagination as something grand, beautiful, and noble. Their attainment seems worth all the toil and anxiety for them.

¹⁰ It is good that nature imposes on us in this manner.

It is this deception which rouses mankind’s industry and keeps it in continual motion. By these labours, the earth has been obliged to double her natural fertility and maintain more people.

This first prompted them to:

• cultivate the ground,
• build houses,
• found cities and commonwealths, and
• invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life

These have:

• entirely changed the world,
• turned the rude forests into fertile plains,
• made the barren ocean a new fund of subsistence,
• made the great communication highways to the different nations.

The proud and unfeeling landlord views his fields and imagines eating the whole harvest, without purpose, nor thought for others. He fulfills the vulgar proverb that the eye is larger than the belly.

His stomach’s capacity is far smaller than the immensity of his desires. It will accept no more than that of the peasant. The rest of the harvest he is obliged to distribute among his servants.

Thus, his servants get a share of life’s necessities from his luxury and caprice.

• They would have expected these in vain from his humanity or justice.

The produce of the soil always maintains nearly as many people as it can maintain.

The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable.

• They consume little more than the poor.
• They divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements despite:
  • their natural selfishness and rapacity,
  • them wanting only their own conveniency, and
  • them employing thousands to gratify their own vain and insatiable desires.

They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of life’s necessities which would have been made, had the earth been divided equally among all its inhabitants.

Thus, without intending or knowing it, they:

• advance the interest of the society, and
• afford the means to multiply the species.

When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who were left out in the partition.

• These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces.

In the real happiness of human life, they are not inferior to those who seem so much above them.

• In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly on a level.
• The beggar, who suns himself by the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.