and should also make independent attempts, which usually fail at first but in the end lead to the goal. Working on improvements, on inventions, learning and attempting, a person renders services to society, which can gain renown and can benefit from inventions and discoveries only when it has many educated people.
In that same part we learned, secondly, that discoveries and inventions are not the work of blind chance but are natural phenomena and are subject to certain laws. We have become acquainted with three such laws. The law of gradualness, on the strength of which every invention or discovery gradually approaches perfection, and which law requires that the inventor be educated professionally. The law of dependence, on the strength of which a new invention or discovery depends on others, known earlier, and cannot be made before them. And finally the law of combination, on the strength of which every new invention or discovery is a combination of other, earlier known discoveries or inventions, or rests on that combination. The last law requires that the inventor have a general education.
These three laws are immensely important and apply not only to discoveries and inventions, but pervade all of nature. An oak does not start out as an oak but as an acorn, then becomes a seedling, later a small tree, and finally a mighty oak: we see here, thus, the law of gradualness. A sown seed will not germinate until it finds sufficient heat, water, soil, and air: here we see the law of dependence. Finally, no animal or plant, or even stone, is something homogeneous and simple but is composed of various organs: here we see the law of combination.
I come now to the third and final part.
There is hardly a craftsman who does not on occasion complain of hard times and of a shortage of work, though on the other hand we all know that we have a shortage of domestically produced wares. Why, then, do the craftsmen complain instead of making them? It is because we import lots of the most varied things from abroad. And why do we import them from abroad?
