"...What is true of human polity seems to me not less so of the distinctively political art of Architecture. I have long felt convinced of the necessity in order to its progress of some determined effort to extricate from the confused mass of partial traditions and dogmata with which it has become encumbered during imperfect or restricted practice those large principles of right which are applicable to every stage and style of it. Uniting the technical and imaginative elements as essentially as humanity does soul and body it shows the same infirmly balanced liability to the prevalence of the lower part over the higher to the interference of the constructive with the purity and simplicity of the reflective element. This tendency like every other form of materialism is increasing with the advance of the age; and the only laws which resist it based upon partial precedents and already regarded with disrespect as decrepit if not with defiance as tyrannical are evidently inapplicable to the new forms and functions of the art which the necessities of the day demand. How many these necessities may become cannot be conjectured; they rise strange and impatient out of every modern shadow of change. How far it may be possible to meet them without a sacrifice of the essential characters of architectural art cannot be determined by specific calculation or observance. There is no law no principle based on past practice which may not be overthrown in a moment by the arising of a new condition or the invention of a new material; and the most rational if not the only mode of averting the danger of an utter dissolution of all that is systematic and consistent in our practice or of ancient authority in our judgment is to cease for a little while our endeavors to deal with the multiplying host of particular abuses restraints or requirements; and endeavor to determine as the guides of every effort some constant general and irrefragable laws of right laws which based upon man's nature not upon his knowledge may possess so far the unchangeableness of the one as that neither the increase nor imperfection of the other may be able to assault or invalidate them..."