We have seen, that in every living creature there is a close and vivid likeness between its spirit and its form, between body and soul. Given such a spirit and it tends to evolve such a form. Given such a form and it tends to evolve such a spirit. The form must limit and modify the spirit.

Fortunately forms can change; and spirit, to grow, continually discards old forms and makes new. If anything succeeds in fixing a given form unchanged, so is the spirit within it imprisoned and checked in growth forever. It is for this reason doubtless that the primal force has been so busy making its endless procession of forms. First we have the universe set whirling with great suns and their spattering planets; then the planet flames, crackles, cools, crusts over, and so fringes out in all manner of soft green, and following these we have life cut looser, freer, in animal forms; lastly the social.

Imagine the sun as loving; it can but shine and glow to express that love. The dog loves, and can but leap and lick and wag his tail, fetch and carry, watch and fight to show it. The man loves, and in the manifold activities made possible by his form, by the special development of the brain, he can express that principal force more deeply, widely, fully. The spirit of every living thing is expressed through its form and limited by it.

Humanity, if a living creature, has a soul and a body. The soul we all know; we call it rightly the human soul. Where is the body of that soul? Not in our little bundle of arms and legs—we had that in full career before the human soul was possible. That is the body of an animal, capable of expressing as much spirit as any animal, perhaps a little more than a large ape. If we had no medium of expression but these physical bodies there could be no Society, no Humanity, and no social soul.

That last and best expression of creative force finds its material form in the things we make in the manufactured world. Take from a society its body, the structure of brick, stone, and iron, wood, cloth, leather, glass, paper,—all that elaborate compound of materials in which we live,—reduce it to a mere congregation of naked animals, and what would ensue? Those animals would either rebuild in desperate haste the material forms in which alone Society exists, or they would relapse into individual savagery. If too small a group, or too highly specialised to reproduce the social body to live in, they would be unable even to revert to savagery and would simply die. The Social Soul we have seen to be a common consciousness developed by common activities. The Social Body is a common material form, also developed by common activities. Both appear in proportion to the extent and development of those activities.

As house and vehicle for the spirit of an animal has been slowly evolved the cunning mechanism of bone and muscle, with all its constituent organs, in which a man lives. It is but a combination of chemicals and minerals, and when the soul is out of it they disintegrate and revert to lower combinations. As house and vehicle for the spirit of society has been slowly evolved the more cunning and elaborate mechanism of wood and cloth, brick, stone, metal—in which Humanity lives. It too is but a combination of chemicals and minerals, and when its inhabiting humanity is gone, it too disintegrates and reverts, though more slowly. The bones of dead societies remain to us in stone and glass and pottery, as do the bones of extinct animals.

An animal life, once started in the germ, goes on growing, i. e., making to itself a body suitable to its soul. If you arrest the growth of the body,—if, for instance, a baby’s head were cased in iron,—you would arrest the growth of the soul. It would have one, potentially; that is, it would if its brain had room for it, but actually you would have checked it. So the social life, once started, goes on assimilating material particles and recombining them in mechanical form, enlarging its functions as it enlarges the structure through which alone they become possible. Society builds its body for good or ill.

A piece of human creation—a manufactured article—is the record, the physical manifestation of our humanness. By these things, reading backward, does the ethnologist reconstruct the vanished races as the paleontologist reconstructs a vanished beast from fossil bones. A bead, a knife, a needle, some torque or bracelet, a broken jar,—and the lost people rise before us.

Man, to be such and such, requires such and such things, and evolves them as naturally as the sea-beast makes its shell. It grows from him—so do our manufactures grow from us. Society secretes, as it were, the manufactured article. We need clothes, for instance, a purely social need. The individual animal does not need clothes. He carries his wardrobe on his back. Never a solitary creature in clothes. Clothes are for other people more than the wearer. Other people are required to make them. Even in a one-generation-reversion, as of some hunting hermit of modern times,—back he goes to buckskin! He cannot shear and card, weave and spin, bleach and dye, cut and sew. Back he goes to borrow some other animal’s skin; and, if he stayed a hunting hermit for enough generations, back would he go to his own skin and its natural growth of hair.

But the increasing social faculties and desires—the love of ornament, the sense of decency, the need of concealment, the demand for a more fluent and delicate expression of personality—these call for clothes, and society evolves them through a thousand trades.

A trade is a social function, and clothing is a social product as hair is a product of the individual body. In the thing made lies our social history so fully that, had we a full line of specimens, we should need no other monument of progress.

The progress of each age rests on its things: the unchipped flint and the polished; the bronze knife and the steel; the wonder-working wheel (how much of social progress goes “on wheels”!); the bow and arrow, the sword, the axe, the spade,—small things for separate use at first,—and then the marvellous, monster engines of to-day; they are at once the means and the record of progress. There is a phase of thought which despises “material things,” and prattles ardently of our “spiritual nature.” But in steady-marching ages of coincidence man’s spiritual nature manifests itself through material things, and grows by means of them. The ships of Tyre made possible that Phoenician civilisation which has so affected the Grecian and all that follow. The roads of Rome knit and fastened her Empire to the ends of the earth.

Axe-man, bow-man, swords-man, plough-man, boatman, pen-man,—there is a steady likeness between man’s things and man. As there is the same likeness between the spirit and the body of each animal, so man, having the new, wide, aspiring, endless, social soul, manifests its growth in ceaseless progression of manufacture, in developing this vast body of Society. The human soul is greater than the animal’s because it has a greater body to live in—complex, universal.

One marvellous power that is ours by virtue of these things is that whereas they do not grow on us personally, we remain somewhat free of their inexorable reaction.

A beast depending mainly on digging for his livelihood, as the mole, is relentlessly modified to claws. Paw, arm and shoulder, neck and head, the body, the fur, the eyes,—he is a digger, and the spirit within him is a contented digger, too—needs must.

Once in a permanent form the spirit accepts it and stops growing.

Man digs mightily, but spade and pick do not grow on him. He takes them up, he lays them down; he substitutes the axe, the scythe, the flail. And so he does not become hopelessly the spade-holder. Too much of one kind of tool, and we have the “Man with the Hoe.”

With this rich fluency of attach- and detachability we have sped up the ages of social evolution with an ease and swiftness inconceivable of any other animal whose machinery is so inalienably attached to his spirit that it takes slow centuries to change him. This is what gives the subtle beauty to the human body, its measureless potentiality. Every other animal’s body is a perfect representation of its blended activities, greater or less. The hound, the cat, the stag, the horse, the swan, each speaks to us of its activities, each form is an embodied motion. But each in its degree is final; being that motion or those motions, it cannot be others; its personal perfection is its limit. Man’s body is an almost limitless possibility. He is the handle of innumerable tools. The upright, balanced trunk leaves the legs free for all possible movement; the high-hung, wide-reaching arms with branching fingers are tenfold elephant trunks; he can perform more kinds of actions than any other creature.

But the distinctive power of these actions involves always the thing made. A collection of human bodies pure and simple would tell you little of their social stage. But a collection of the tools and weapons of the man would tell you what he was and where.

With the detachability comes the great characteristic of exchangeability, the “our-ness” of human things; the social body is necessarily usable by all. There is no vexed question of possession with the beast. His teeth and claws are his indeed; he cannot lend or give, and none can rob him. His “dogness” is a little bundle all his own, but our “man-ness” lies in these wide-flung tools of ours, made by one, used by another, profited in by all.

This is again our infinite advantage. If the protean change of characteristics made possible to us by tool-chest and armory were possible to any other creature we should not hold our easy supremacy. The dying leader of the wolf-pack cannot hand his superior teeth to the next one, or produce sudden wings and lend them to his followers. The distributability of our tools gives us the limitless flux of power which is human. One man makes swords for a thousand, and each sword spreads the sword-power far and wide. The needle, the pen, all individual tools, may be used by many in turn, to the advantage of all.

Even more do we see this advantage in anything which may be used by many at once. Here indeed is humanness made manifest. Men, separate men, may swim as well as some animals, or ride a log, perhaps a hollowed one. But man, the human creature, man socialised, make for themself the ship, a swimming body for the social soul, and in that one material product of humanity lies unmeasured share of our real growth and greatness.

Only men together can make it, with ages of gradual evolution and relentless elimination of the unfit, with elaborate specialisation and co-ordination of effort; only man together and in similar complex relation can use it. And because of this larger range of usability is its larger value. More persons can use it, and for a longer time; it is a large and lasting piece of the social structure. So of the road, the bridge, the hall,—whatever is open to the largest use by the most people for the longest time, this is of the largest value to society; as statue, picture, music, book. In direct practical result these common products for our common use minimise effort and maximise gain, and in the living miracle of their use they steadily react upon the user and make him something nearer to the power that made them. The shiny-bladed knife in the hand of the eager boy cries to him to cut, to carve, to do a thousand things; and as he uses it, skill, the human skill bred by long ages of knife-using, is born anew in him. Ward has shown this—achievement embodied in object.

The pillared temple, visible product of the human soul in purest, proudest aspiration, reacts always on those who come within, lifting their spirits to its plane, to each according to his power of receiving. In our made things lies that much of our humanness, and as we use them we grow by that much more human; in this reactive power lies the desirability of the Thing, and its importance. The power of “mind over matter” is commonly observed, but the effect of matter upon mind, the reaction of the body upon the spirit, is not so clear to us. We see the human spirit laying violent hands on clay and wood and iron, and building for itself a visible, tangible form. We do not see so well this visible form steadily and inexorably reacting upon the imprisoned spirit.

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.

Beyond even that, we construct the complex implements of further construction, and make machines. Man’s first step up was in the detachable tool, though but a stick or stone. From the hand-thrown stone to the far-flung lyddite shell is a clear line of mechanical evolution, in which each thing made held the thought which made it and suggested further possibility. From the twirling spindle to the many-loomed mill; from the stylus to the press,—this is familiar ground in fact, but all untrodden in its rich significance.

Nowhere have we more misused, misunderstood, and blasphemed the laws of human life than in our attitude toward machinery. Measured by any standard you will, as low as that of individual physical comfort, as high as that of the widest social service, human progress, lying in the same line as all evolution, involves the constant adaptation of means to ends with conservation of energy. Most energy is spent with smallest result at the level where the mole digs, each for himself, with his tools growing on him. The spade is higher than the claw, and the modern earth-devouring excavator is higher than the spade. Some digging is necessary for the maintenance of our physical lives. The more human energy we spend in digging the less remains for further development. To dig is not our purpose here, but to grow. Therefore social evolution quietly relegates digging to the lower automatic functions, making the mechanical organs by which the most digging can be done by the least men, that more and more of us may leave the level of the mole.

Of all things made, the things we make things with are most vitally and distinctively human. Something of the truth of this may be seen in the larger and deeper pleasure given by the use of the higher tool, and, even more clearly, in the higher kind of man developed by the higher tool. The digger with the attached claws is but a mole. The digger with the detachable spade is but an “unskilled labourer,” and even the maker of that spade but a simple smith. The digger with the great excavator is an engineer, and its maker a skilled machinist and inventor. The ox-driver is not to be compared with the engine-driver or the bargeman with the admiral.

Now the mole, or the unskilled labourer, may be as “happy,” as an individual, as the skilled machinist. But the measure of their value is in this. The mole is incapable of further combinations. The unskilled labourer is capable only of a low order of combinations. The more specialised brain of the inventor is capable of higher combinations. Of such as he a democracy can be built; he is raised far along the line of social evolution. The childish, primitive pride in a “hand-made” individual product is most ignoble compared to the modern pride in a common product through complex means.

The brain to make and to use a complex machine is the brain to make and to use a complex social order; and in that growing social order lies our line of duty as a human race. In the inexorable working of our own machines we learn law newly; as in our works of art we learn beauty newly. Kipling has treated of this in “MacAndrews’ Hymn.”

The relation of our complex mechanical products with our minds and hearts is as clear as the relation between any animal’s spirit and body. The increasing pleasure is as clear as the increasing use. “Man loves power.” Of course. He loves to transmit energy, to feel it pouring through. He loves it well in his own physical exertions: to swim is a pleasure, to row alone is a pleasure, but to row in a racing eight is a greater pleasure. To sail a catboat is a pleasure, to command the flagship a greater pleasure. The captain loves his ship, and loves to work her, to feel the complex mechanism move in answer to his thought and will, and the prompt co-ordination of all the men whose combined efforts move the great machine. And the kind of man who can be a good captain or a good sailor is a higher social constituent than a South Sea Islander, though the latter could outswim him.

Our general feeling of condemnation for machinery is a kind of social asceticism, a reaction from our misuse of the social body, just as the personal asceticism of earlier times was a reaction against misuse of the personal body. In our blind ignorance of the real social life and its laws, in our persistent maintenance of a rudimentary egoism, we have claimed private ownership in these exquisitely social products, and have striven to restrict their mighty multiplication of wealth to private consumption. Such sublime treason has roused instinctive reaction in the public consciousness, and we blindly include the machine in our hatred of its vile abuse, as did the early Christian in his condemnation of the body. Partly owing to this, and partly owing to our cruel form of specialisation, we associate evil with machinery, and, with our usual helpless reversionary tendency, look back fondly to the time when each man or woman worked alone “by hand.”

These theorists should be set down in some wilderness for a while with only their hands to help them, as a lesson in social chronology. The hand is at its best in the early PalÆolithic period, or even back of that, when it could do duty as a foot on occasion. As the hand made and mastered the tool, society has grown. As the tool became the machine, society has grown better. In the vast machine, moved by tireless natural forces, and guided by the specialised brain and hand, we find the highest expression of nature’s steady tendency to minimise effort and maximise results.

When we appreciate the true use and nature of all this machinery, realising that by means of its measureless service we can now apply almost all our power to the conscious development of society, we shall find it to be an unmixed blessing, of value beyond our dreams. Seeing that the social soul needs such and such a body, and is developed with it, and that we have at last the means of evolving that body at a speed hitherto impossible, we can now utilise these unlimited forces to facilitate our growth with results that will make previous historic progress seem stationary. It is not as if we were required to force long cycles of evolution, to hasten the steps of nature, and hurry mankind over slow steps of necessary ascent,—we are there now!

Society being an organic whole, social progress being ours in common and exquisitely transmissible, the material forms of that progress and vehicles of transmission being ready to hand, we can, by our present means of rapid production and distribution of these material forms, open the way to such swift advance of civilisation as the world has never seen. The spirit of modern society is capable of a plane of life far beyond the present conditions wherein we find that spirit gagged and blinded by the fossil Ego concept, that body inconceivably dwarfed and twisted by the efforts of each ego to occupy it all himself.

The right relation of spirit and body in the animal gives health and beauty and power, and in our human life the right relation of the social spirit and body is as important. A healthy, growing, social life constantly re-creates its body as does the physical life, and our American civilisation shows this beyond all others in its rapid adoption of new material forms and processes. The constant demand for easier and swifter mechanism is as natural and healthful in society as it is in a physical body, and physical evolution has moved on that line continually.

The passing over of individual effort to the automatic action of machinery is analogous to the constant passing over of conscious cerebral action to the less expensive automatic management of lower brain centres—the development of “habit.” The body is not the man, and brick and mortar are not Society; but their connection is as intimate and vital. And as the soul of a man is grievously injured or equally benefited by the condition and use of his body, so is Society affected for good or ill by the mechanical forms in which it lives, their condition and their use.

Recognising as the first quality distinguishing the social body from the physical, that it is made by common action and open to common use, and recognising that the proper use of the body has a reactive effect in developing the soul, we have here a means of promoting social growth so prodigious in its scope and speed as to be fairly dizzying. We have, as usual, felt this great social truth, even though not understanding it, and our groping efforts in its pursuance are seen in two main lines: that which urges to “truth in art” in our common crafts; to making things beautiful, true, good, that all may be improved by them, and in our blind but earnest effort to provide “better housing for the poor,” with all that that implies.

We have seen that the slum tends to make the criminal, and that the school, bath, playground, museum, library, art gallery, free access to the best products of society, tend to make the better citizen; but we have not seen the large and simple principle involved.

Each thing made is an embodiment of social energy, and transmits it to the user, be it a fork or a fiddle. A noble and beautiful work ennobles and beautifies the beholder, listener, reader, occupant,—the user. All especially general social structures, or those glorious deposits of energy known as works of art, as well as all the materials of knowledge, are valuable in proportion to their free and public use.

The more people circulate in their great social body the more socialised they become. This we are doing much to promote in our free schools, libraries, museums, etc., but we do not begin to appreciate the possibilities involved, being impeded, as usual, by our prior concepts, Want theory and Pay concept in particular. The increased facilities of travel of our time, for instance, which should be enlarging the mind of the public as well as increasing its wealth, are greatly restricted in application by these errors. The people who administer our railroads are allowed by popular consent to “own” them; and as owners, regarding their property as bound in the first instance to “pay” them, they maintain as high a list of charges as “the traffic will bear.” When we recognise locomotion as a prime social necessity, these ribbons of steel and their rolling-stock as part of the social body, and traffic and travel as social advantages rather than individual,—yes, social necessities,—then we shall encourage the widest possible use of these facilities.

We have but to recognise the vital connection between the growing social body and the growing social soul, and that the soul not only makes the body, but is made by it, to apply our immense material gain to our whole people. The results will be what our discouraged and patient minds are apt to call “too good to be true.”