He Is A Shifting Basis On Which No
Equilibrium Of Habit And Civilisation Can Be Established.
Were it
not for this constant change in our physical powers, which our
mechanical limbs have brought about, man
Would have long since
apparently attained his limit of possibility; he would be a creature
of as much fixity as the ants and bees; he would still have advanced,
but no faster than other animals advance.
If there were a race of men without any mechanical appliances we
should see this clearly. There are none, nor have there been, so far
as we can tell, for millions and millions of years. The lowest
Australian savage carries weapons for the fight or the chase, and has
his cooking and drinking utensils at home; a race without these
things would be completely ferae naturae and not men at all. We are
unable to point to any example of a race absolutely devoid of extra-
corporaneous limbs, but we can see among the Chinese that with the
failure to invent new limbs a civilisation becomes as much fixed as
that of the ants; and among savage tribes we observe that few
implements involve a state of things scarcely human at all. Such
tribes only advance pari passu with the creatures upon which they
feed.
It is a mistake, then, to take the view adopted by a previous
correspondent of this paper, to consider the machines as identities,
to animalise them and to anticipate their final triumph over mankind.
They are to be regarded as the mode of development by which human
organism is most especially advancing, and every fresh invention is
to be considered as an additional member of the resources of the
human body.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 41 of 52
Words from 11011 to 11297
of 14251
