If we examine the connection between man and his weapon we find that the latter differs from an eagle’s beak or a tiger’s claw in but one essential point: it is no longer an integral part of the organism. It can be detached at will, and replaced by another weapon. Its separation or destruction does not imply an injury to the organism. Man is not put out of action by losing his weapon. He is only reduced to his original position with respect to his antagonist. And even that is no irreparable loss so long as he has other weapons at his command. Thus the same step which vastly increased his offensive power also made him comparatively immune to attack.
Now, a weapon in a man’s hand, so long as it is in active use as a weapon, is a part of the man himself. It is true that he can lose it without perishing himself, but he can also lose an arm or a leg and still survive. The mere fact that the man’s blood circulates in his natural leg and not in a wooden leg he may substitute for it makes no essential difference. He may kick with either. And we know that a man’s leg, like all the cells of his body, is largely compound of inert matter such as food products and waste products, besides being nine-tenths water—an inorganic substance. A wooden leg, or any weapon which a man may use, may therefore be regarded as a limb of the man’s body, so long, that is, as it is in active use. And if a “soul” animates that man’s body and drives it to perform deeds of valour, the same soul will animate his weapon. The soul of the weapon is the soul of the man who uses it.
There is an increasing tendency in modern thought to abolish the distinction between soul and body and to regard them as one and indivisible. Adopting that view, we may assert that the use of a weapon means the enlargement of a man’s body and the simultaneous expansion of his soul. Every weapon, every tool, every machine is the embodiment of a human thought and purpose. The user adopts that thought and purpose, and behold—the machine has found its soul!
II
Man is an animal who laughs and cooks.
When Prometheus had caught some sparks from the chariot of the sun and brought them safely to earth, hidden in a tube, there was consternation on Mount Olympus. The Conservative Government of that privileged stronghold trembled for its celestial prerogatives. It was all very well, they said, for Hephæstus to blow his bellows in his workshop and produce beautiful things for Olympians, so long as he did it under proper supervision. But fire, once brought to earth, would set the whole world ablaze and consume them in their palaces.
Hephæstus himself was not perturbed. Remembering the kindness he met with on Lemnos after his brutal expulsion from the company of the gods, he secretly sympathized with Prometheus and his race, and planned a closer co-operation with mankind. His Sicilian workshops saw him oftener than before, hobbling about among his furnaces and experimenting with every kind of ore and ingot. Wherever he went, whether among gods or men, his kindness and his merry humour made him a general favourite.
Although he often made weapons, he much preferred to make tools and ornaments. Among the Olympians, his strangely begotten “sister” Athene was his closest ally. Like him, she favoured the arts of peace rather than those of war, and despised the noisy and swashbuckling Ares. When Athene went to take up her abode in her Parthenon at Athens, he forsook Olympus and removed his furnaces to Lipari, off the Sicilian coast. And it was in Sicily, some centuries later, that his great disciple Archimedes was born, the man who was fitted and destined to establish the reign of Hephæstus in spite of the strenuous opposition of the Roman republic and its subsequent imperial and ecclesiastical successors.
When man was endowed with fire he received the gift without knowing whence it came or what it meant. Greek mythology, with its deep insight into unseen things, presents us Helios, the sun-god, as a friend of Hephæstus, the god of fire. We moderns express the same truth differently. We say that all fire on earth is ultimately derived from the sun. Archimedes kindled fires—preferably in Roman ships—by means of concave mirrors which condensed the heat of the sun to a focus. The fuel for the fires was also provided by the heat of the sun, absorbed by the chlorophyll of the leaves in the forest and used to build up combustible wood and other products. The firing of the wood reversed the process of accumulation of solar energy and provided light and heat by day and by night, independently of the sun, the original giver. For a hundred million years already had the sun shone on a habitable earth, pouring out its light and heat and nourishing the luxuriant vegetation which covered most of the globe. For untold ages had the plants stored up the sunlight for some unknown end. That end became manifest when Prometheus kindled the first fire and made a new realm accessible to man. Till then, mankind had undergone the annual and daily vicissitudes of heat and cold due to the days and the seasons, but he had not controlled them. When he acquired the mastery of fire, he was enabled to wander north and south and take with him in his brazier the accustomed heat of the tropics.