Sir Henry Maine supports this doctrine in a graphic paragraph: “Unchecked by external truth the mind of man has a fatal facility for ensnaring and entrapping and entangling itself. But happily, happily for the human race, some fragment of physical speculation has been built into every false system.”
Things are the source of ideas. Action generates thought. He who has tools in his hand thinks best as well as acts best. The man whose finger is on Nature’s pulse feels her heart-throbs, and so discovers and utilizes her secrets. The men and women who do the world’s work are better educated than the schoolmen who vainly tell them how to do it; and they are better educated because they are in closer relationship with things, through the supreme sense of touch, which refines and spiritualizes the hand—that wonderful member which differentiates man from the other animals, and makes him their master.
Manual Training educationally, then, relates to all the arts whose sum is the art of living. For whether it be the chair on which we sit; or the bed on which we lie; or the garments we wear; or the house that shelters us; or the railway train on which we cross continents; or the ship that takes us over seas; or the unspeakable marvels of the world’s museums and galleries upon which we gaze with rapture; or the orchestra of an hundred instruments, whose music enchants us; or the treasures of dead cities—long buried—now unearthed; or the temples in which we worship; or the monuments which commemorate our heroes and martyrs; or the tombs in which we moulder away to dust—they are all the work of the hand!
Manual Training is the acquisition by the hand of the arts through which man expresses himself in things. It is a series of educational generalizations in things. The purpose of it is to put the mind and hand en rapport with each other; to make the hand acquainted with the elementary manipulations of the typical arts, by actual exercises, as the mind is familiarized with the fundamental principles of the sciences by studying their laws.
Superior observation is only another name for genius. To the dull eye the falling apple taught no lesson, but to Newton’s quick apprehension it revealed the law of gravitation!
It is not alone, however, in the sense of sight that observation resides; nor is it keenest there. We have recently learned the value of object teaching; but we have yet to learn, popularly and practically, what has long been known to science—that the sense of touch is the master sense, whence all the other senses spring. It is because of this fact, and of the further fact that the sense of touch is most highly developed in the hand, that man is the wisest of animals.
It follows that more than in the sense of seeing, hearing, tasting, or smelling—nay, more than in all these senses combined—the faculty of observation resides in the hand.
Dr. Wilson declares that touch “reigns throughout the body, and is the token of life in every part”; and Dr. Maudsley says: “It is the fundamental sense, the mother-tongue of language.”
How apt is this definition of the sense of touch—“the token of life in every part”—and how comprehensive this—“the mother-tongue of language!” And of this master sense the hand is the chief organ and minister. How versatile it is; what adaptability it possesses; what helpfulness! In the moment of danger how reassuring its supporting grasp; how consoling its gentle touch when grief overwhelms! In defeat how it trembles with emotion, and how tense with exaltation it becomes in the hour of victory! With what infinite loathing it shrinks from a hated contact, and with what sympathetic vibrations of ardor responds to the clinging pressure of love!
If we would become familiar with objects we must subject them to the test of touch, we must handle them. As Robert Seidel, a great teacher, well says: “We must stretch them, beat them, cool them, expose them to the sun, the water, the air—we must work them.”