The innovation must have the support of the
canon of conspicuous waste. Any feature in the physiognomy of
goods, however pleasing in itself, and however well it may
approve itself to the taste for effective work, will not be
tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this norm of pecuniary
reputability.
The ceremonial inferiority or uncleanness in consumable goods due
to "commonness," or in other words to their slight cost of
production, has been taken very seriously by many persons. The
objection to machine products is often formulated as an objection
to the commonness of such goods. What is common is within the
(pecuniary) reach of many people. Its consumption is therefore
not honorific, since it does not serve the purpose of a favorable
invidious comparison with other consumers. Hence the consumption,
or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an odious
suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away
from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that
is extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of
sensibility. In persons whose tastes assert themselves
imperiously, and who have not the gift, habit, or incentive to
discriminate between the grounds of their various judgments of
taste, the deliverances of the sense of the honorific coalesce
with those of the sense of beauty and of the sense of
serviceability -- in the manner already spoken of; the resulting
composite valuation serves as a judgment of the object's beauty
or its serviceability, according as the valuer's bias or interest
inclines him to apprehend the object in the one or the other of
these aspects.
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