Man the only maker and user of tools. One of the most important ways in which man is distinguished from the lower animals is in his manufacture and use of tools. So far as we know the ability to manufacture and understand the use of tools is possessed by man alone. "Monkeys may be taught a few simple operations with tools, such as cracking nuts with a stone, but usually they merely mimic a man."[1] Man's uniqueness as the exclusive maker and user of tools is made possible by two things. The first is his hand, which with its four fingers and a thumb, as contrasted with the monkey's five fingers, enables him to pick up objects. The second is his capacity for reflection, presently to be discussed, which enables him to foresee the consequences of the things he does.
[Footnote 1: Mills: The Realities of Modern Science, p. 1.]
The use of tools of increasing refinement and complexity is the chief method by which man has progressed from the life of the cave man to the complicated industrial civilization of to-day. Bergson writes in this connection:
As regards human intelligence, it has not been sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential feature, that even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments, that the inventions which strew the road of progress have also traced its direction. This we hardly realize, because it takes us longer to change ourselves than to change our tools. Our individual and even social habits survive a good while the circumstances for which they were made, so that the ultimate effects of an invention are not observed until its novelty is already out of sight. A century has elapsed since the invention of the steam engine, and we are only just beginning to feel the depths of the shock it gave us. But the revolution it has effected in industry has nevertheless upset human relations altogether. New ideas are arising, new feelings are on the way to flower. In thousands of years, when, seen from the distance, only the broad lines of the present age will still be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even supposing they are remembered at all; but the steam engine and the procession of inventions that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times: it will serve to define an age. If we could rid ourselves of all pride, if, to define our species, we kept strictly to what the historic and the prehistoric periods show us to be the constant characteristic of man and of intelligence, we should not say Homo sapiens, but Homo faber.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bergson: Creative Evolution, pp. 138-39.]
Man's intelligence, it has so often been said, enables him to control Nature, but his intelligence in the control of natural resources is dependent for effectiveness on adequate material instruments. One may subscribe, though with qualification, to Bergson's further statement, that "intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture."
Anthropologists distinguish the prehistoric epochs, by such terms as the Stone, Copper or Bronze, and Iron Ages, meaning thereby to indicate what progress man had made in the utilization of the natural resources about him. We date the remote periods of mankind chiefly by the mementos we have of the kinds of tools they used and the methods they had developed in the control of their environment. The knowledge of how to start and maintain a fire has been set down as the practical beginning of civilization. Certainly next in importance was the invention of the simplest tools. There came in succession, though æons apart, the use of chipped stone implements, bronze or copper instruments, and instruments made of iron. In the ancient world we find the invention of such simple machines as the pulley, the use of rope, and the inclined plane.
Without tracing the history of invention, it will suffice for our purpose to point out that agriculture and industry, men's modes of exploiting Nature, are dependent intimately on the effectiveness of the tools at their disposal. It is a far cry from the flint hatchet to the McCormick reaper and the modern steel works, but these are two ends of the same process, that process which distinguishes man from all other animals, and makes human civilization possible: that is, the use and the manufacture of tools.
CHAPTER II
TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THEIR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE—INSTINCT, HABIT, AND EMOTION