But the directions in which activity readily unfolds or expresses itself are the directions to which long and close habituation has made the mind prone.
So far as concerns the essential elements of beauty, this habituation is an habituation so close and long as to have induced not only a proclivity to the apperceptive form in question, but an adaptation of physiological structure and function as well.

So far as the economic interest enters into the constitution of beauty, it enters as a suggestion or expression of adequacy to a purpose, a manifest and readily inferable subservience to the life process.

This expression of economic facility or economic serviceability in any object--what may be called the economic beauty of the object-is best sewed by neat and unambiguous suggestion of its office and its efficiency for the material ends of life.
On this ground, among objects of use the simple and unadorned article is aesthetically the best.

But since the pecuniary canon of reputability rejects the inexpensive in articles appropriated to individual consumption, the satisfaction of our craving for beautiful things must be sought by way of compromise.

The canons of beauty must be circumvented by some contrivance which will give evidence of a reputably wasteful expenditure, at the same time that it meets the demands of our critical sense of the useful and the beautiful, or at least meets the demand of some habit which has come to do duty in place of that sense.
Such an auxiliary sense of taste is the sense of novelty; and this latter is helped out in its surrogateship by the curiosity with which men view ingenious and puzzling contrivances.