The made thing is the vehicle, record, and monument of human progress. The things we make are nearer to the human soul than is the physical body. That body is but a machine in which our nerve currents have run so long and intimately that the act is unconscious, and we say “I did this,” not “my hand did it.”
If a baby could express his relation to his body in plain words, we should find him getting acquainted with it, “learning it” as one learns a bicycle or a sewing-machine. He can make it work, but he has to learn how, as he would have to learn how to row or shoot.
Moreover, It has its tendencies and habits with which he has to respectfully acquaint himself that he may promote or check or change them; the tendencies and habits of a long-established animal mechanism, in which the human soul is quartered. The tools and implements in the use of which lies our humanness are scarcely more foreign to us than his hands and feet were to the baby, or than some new combination of muscular action is to the adult. We have to learn to act through sword and spear, spade and plough, knife and axe, as we had to learn to act through muscle, cord, and bone, and they become as automatically natural to us in due time.
The physical body is not an end but a means. Life is the end, action; the body is what you do it with. So these material forms we make are not ends, but means. Human life is the end, and these things are what we do it with. The expression of force through higher forms, that is life’s line of progress.
Our creations are all to do something in, or with, or from. Even the most perfect form of art stands as an inspiration to other human beings, is a means to better action, better living for us all. Every human product is an instrument, in using which we can more fully express the divine spirit. A house is not a final end. We do not build a house as a crowning achievement and then sit and wait upon it for the rest of life—or at least we should not! We build a house to live in, that we may work. Human life is not a means of promoting house-building; house-building is a means of promoting human life.
Book, picture, statue, these are our fruit, our product, evolved through us as a means of further growth. Our “civilised” life to-day, the consciousness of an “educated,” “cultivated” person, is developed by contact with the things in which previous human beings expressed their measure of life and passed it on to us.
Some brain is born with new cellular development which enables it to receive impressions from mountain scenery, which scenery had hitherto failed to impress the less developed brain. The brain impressed must express the force received, must transmit it in a material form. According to its capacity it works to do this, producing picture or poem or prose description. That material form continues to transmit the impression received to those whose brains are developed in comparative similarity, and the race is gradually opened to the stimulus of this aspect of nature, and by so much is greater, wiser, able to do more.
Human work, all of it, is a means to further expression. If we ask “to what end,” we can only reply that as far as our lit circle of perception goes life has no end. But its direction is plain, and its method; to receive more and more of the forces of life as the brain becomes more widely and delicately susceptible, to express more and more of the forces of life in our work, and so further to develop that brain,—that is the process. The savage has not brain development enough to “see God” with even as much as we, or as little; he is but dimly and narrowly affected by the currents of divine force. But such energy as he does receive prompts him to work, and as he works he develops further brain power. In working is human growth, and in its visible forms is the permanence and transmissibility of each advance.
Take cloth, for instance, as an illustration of the value of the thing made. Imagine it out of human life. See its relation to the human skin, both in clothing and cleanliness—fancy man with neither shirt, towel, nor handkerchief! We revert at once to leather and foul habits. No carpets, no hangings, no banners and flags, no sheeted beds, no daintiness in eating, no subtle play of feeling in our dress—down would go human history backward, ravelling out to first principles. Cloth is a social tissue which enables us to come close and slip smoothly in our complex interaction. Leather means solitude and living out of doors. Civilisation is inwoven with the twisted threads; textile manufacture is a social function.
These material forms which humanity makes are not gross and ignoble, as the blind asceticism of the past supposed; they are humanity’s living body, and should be lovingly and reverently regarded, most honourably and gladly constructed, as the intimate avenues of spiritual growth for us all. Human production is marked plainly higher than that of lower animals because it is in common. One makes alone for many to use; or, as we progress still further, many make together for still more to use.