Evolution of the Mechanic Arts. 197 



INature to the organism itself. As soon as the power of 

 discrimination has advanced far enough to be, not only con- 

 sciously percipient, but deliberately rational, a wholly new 

 state of things is inaugurated. For now the organism is 

 no longer dependent for its adjustments upon the imme- 

 diate results of its own co-ordinated movements. From 

 the time that a stone was first used by a monkey to crack 

 a nut, by a bird to break a shell, or even by a spider to 

 balance its web, the necessary connexion between the ad- 

 vance of mental discrimination and muscular co-ordination 

 was severed. With the use of tools there was given to 

 Mind the means of progressing independently of further 

 progress in muscular co-ordination. And so mavelously has 

 the highest animal availed itself of such means, that now, 

 among the civilized races of mankind, more than a million 

 per cent, of his adjustive movements are performed by 

 mechanisms of his own construction. Wonderful as are 

 the muscular co-ordinations of a tight-rope dancer, they are 

 nothing in point of utility as compared with the co-ordinated 

 movements of a spinning-jenny. Therefore, although man 

 owes a countless debt of gratitude to the long line of his 

 brutal ancestry for bequeathing to him so surpassingly'ex- 

 quisite a mechanism as that of the human body a mech- 

 anism without which it would be impossible for him, with 

 any powers of mind, to construct the artificial mechanisms 

 which he does still man may justly feel that his charter 

 of superiority over the lower animals is before all else 

 secured by this, that his powers of adjustive movement 

 have been emancipated from their necessary alliance with 

 his powers of muscular co-ordination." 



This emancipation of man's adjustive powers from the 

 limitations of muscular co-ordination, and their relegation 

 to his powers of nervous organization, brings him into co- 

 ordination with those instruments mentioned by Spencer, 

 which "are artificial extensions of the senses," and those 

 levers, screws, hammers, etc., which *'are artificial exten- 

 sions of the limbs." Through this new correlation comes 

 man's power not only to understand, but to master, the 

 world and all it may contain. In other words, through this 

 new relation Man becomes one member of an equation, 

 which is the mathematical expression or co-ordination of 

 which the other term is, practically, the whole of Nature 

 Avith all its known and all its yet undiscovered wealth of 

 ])Ossil)ility. 



