It
may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of
some "base" metal, such as aluminum, the value of which may be no
more than some ten to twenty cents. The former of the two
utensils is, in fact, commonly a less effective contrivance for
its ostensible purpose than the latter. The objection is of
course ready to hand that, in taking this view of the matter, one
of the chief uses, if not the chief use, of the costlier spoon is
ignored; the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our taste, our sense of
the beautiful, while that made by machinery out of the base metal
has no useful office beyond a brute efficiency. The facts are no
doubt as the objection states them, but it will be evident on
rejection that the objection is after all more plausible than
conclusive. It appears (1) that while the different materials of
which the two spoons are made each possesses beauty and
serviceability for the purpose for which it is used, the material
of the hand-wrought spoon is some one hundred times more valuable
than the baser metal, without very greatly excelling the latter
in intrinsic beauty of grain or color, and without being in any
appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical
serviceability; (2) if a close inspection should show that the
supposed hand-wrought spoon were in reality only a very clever
citation of hand-wrought goods, but an imitation so cleverly
wrought as to give the same impression of line and surface to any
but a minute examination by a trained eye, the utility of the
article, including the gratification which the user derives from
its contemplation as an object of beauty, would immediately
decline by some eighty or ninety per cent, or even more; (3) if
the two spoons are, to a fairly close observer, so nearly
identical in appearance that the lighter weight of the spurious
article alone betrays it, this identity of form and color will
scarcely add to the value of the machine-made spoon, nor
appreciably enhance the gratification of the user's "sense of
beauty" in contemplating it, so long as the cheaper spoon is not
a novelty, ad so long as it can be procured at a nominal cost.
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