What the mechanical arts are

The mechanical contains seven sciences: wool-working, armament, navigation, agriculture, hunting, medicine, the theatrical. Of these, three pertain to the outer clothing of nature, by which nature protects herself from harms, four to the inner, by which she nourishes herself by feeding and cherishing; after the likeness indeed of the trivium and the quadrivium, because the trivium treats of words, which are outside, and the quadrivium of understandings, which are conceived within. These are the seven handmaids whom Mercury received from Philology as a dowry; since doubtless all human action serves the eloquence to which wisdom is joined, as Tully says in the books of Rhetoric about the study of eloquence: it makes life safe, honorable, illustrious, and likewise pleasant. For from it very many advantages come to the commonwealth, if wisdom, the governor of all, is at hand. From it praise, honor and dignity flow to those who have attained it. From it also their friends have a most certain and safest protection. These are called mechanical, that is adulterate, because they treat of the work of the artificer, which borrows its form from nature. As the other seven are called liberal; either because they require free, that is unencumbered and exercised minds, since they dispute subtly of the causes of things; or because in ancient times only free men, that is the noble, were wont to study them, while the common people and the sons of the ignoble were put to the mechanical arts for skill in working. In which appears the diligence of the ancients, who would leave nothing untried, but bind all things under fixed rules and precepts. Mechanics is the science to which the workshops of all things ought to contribute.