We are apt to think of this beautiful tool of ours as highly specialized. It is not; it was preserved unspecialized from the amphibian stage throughout a long pre-human history, as though life had indeed foreseen just what was coming and knew that its versatility would make it the worthy partner of man's versatile brain. Let us put it that way. (Or let us say that it was a happy accident. As you please; anyhow the fact remains.) The result was that man possessed a natural tool beautifully adaptable for making and using many and various artificial tools. And there was not another creature upon earth that had not either spoilt its hand for those various uses by specializing it for some narrow use, or like the monkeys and the apes, had no brain to match. Man specialized his feet, as the monkeys and the apes did not; he left his multifarious hand alone.
By means of this hand he projected into space the powers of his body and his mind. He began, no doubt, with sticks and stones; he went on to strings; and from sticks and stones and strings he passed to telescopes with which he reached new stars, spectroscopes with which he saw what they were made of, telegraphs and telephones through which his speech and hearing stretched out from land to land, and destructive machines by which his delicate fingers shattered and blasted with the power of a thousand storms. These things and more he has done; and all the tools he has used are extensions of both his body and his mind. So too are the industrial machines by which he manufactures (note the word) what his newly-complicated needs demand of clothes and food and furniture and the like. So too are the astounding machines which make for him other and different machines. And everywhere we see that in the advance of his tool-devising he draws nearer to making those which will work either without his aid or with very little of it. His tools grow more and more automatic, more and more saving of the labour of mind. He makes, you may say, artificial habit-bearers, motor-structures by which the devices of his mind are carried into action independent of his mind, as other devices are through his nervous system and his muscular limbs. Thus he follows the example set him by life in its organizing of living tools. And we ought to tell ourselves (parenthetically) at this point that the one reasonable and worthy use of all our machinery is just this—to follow the example of life not only in the actual organizing but in the purpose and meaning of organization. We ought to acknowledge to ourselves that unless our machinery liberates the mind and spirit of man to serve better and more freely his spiritual needs it will of a certainty enslave him. At present, because most of us are in the dark as to the direction in which life strives to conduct us, machinery is used to emancipate the few and to enslave the many. We do not know what we are doing, we do not understand what the primacy of spirit means or should mean for us all. We do not know how we ought to grow, every one of us, in the natural, that is, in the spiritual way.