By the establishing of habit-memories in the nervous structures of man consciousness is liberated for another and, if the man will, a nobler use. The instrument may be forgotten, the work goes on. This liberation of the spirit from attention to modes of activity and actions that can be automatically or almost automatically carried on is among life's greatest triumphs. And the triumph is indefinitely extended in man's peculiar relation to his tools, and through the peculiar character of both his tools and his tool-making.

An animal's tools are parts of its body; they are stings, claws, fangs and so on. Some of the tools of man are also parts of his body; but there are others, not his natural organs, by which its instrumentality is extended—and that, you may say, without signs of coming to an end. It seems as though life had a sort of prophetic instinct in this business; for primitive man was driven to search for these new tools by his lack of organic armament of either the offensive or the defensive kind. He had no protective shield like the armadillo or the crab; and even the scanty covering of hair, which contrasted so ill with the close fur of his cousins, grew scantier still, until it became altogether useless against rain or cold or storm. He had no claws, no tusks, worth considering as weapons of offence; but he had a desirous and adventurous mind, and both by his necessities and his mind he was driven to the making of tools. He owned also one very remarkable natural tool. He had an archaic five-fingered hand inherited from his amphibian ancestors, which had not been specialized into a wing or a shaft ending in a hoof or a paw—a hand plastic, mobile, delicate and sensitive, a very 'instrument of instruments' for a creature opening wide the gate for life.

We are apt to think of this beautiful tool of ours as highly specialized. It is not; it was preserved unspecialized from the amphibian stage throughout a long pre-human history, as though life had indeed foreseen just what was coming and knew that its versatility would make it the worthy partner of man's versatile brain. Let us put it that way. (Or let us say that it was a happy accident. As you please; anyhow the fact remains.) The result was that man possessed a natural tool beautifully adaptable for making and using many and various artificial tools. And there was not another creature upon earth that had not either spoilt its hand for those various uses by specializing it for some narrow use, or like the monkeys and the apes, had no brain to match. Man specialized his feet, as the monkeys and the apes did not; he left his multifarious hand alone.

By means of this hand he projected into space the powers of his body and his mind. He began, no doubt, with sticks and stones; he went on to strings; and from sticks and stones and strings he passed to telescopes with which he reached new stars, spectroscopes with which he saw what they were made of, telegraphs and telephones through which his speech and hearing stretched out from land to land, and destructive machines by which his delicate fingers shattered and blasted with the power of a thousand storms. These things and more he has done; and all the tools he has used are extensions of both his body and his mind. So too are the industrial machines by which he manufactures (note the word) what his newly-complicated needs demand of clothes and food and furniture and the like. So too are the astounding machines which make for him other and different machines. And everywhere we see that in the advance of his tool-devising he draws nearer to making those which will work either without his aid or with very little of it. His tools grow more and more automatic, more and more saving of the labour of mind. He makes, you may say, artificial habit-bearers, motor-structures by which the devices of his mind are carried into action independent of his mind, as other devices are through his nervous system and his muscular limbs. Thus he follows the example set him by life in its organizing of living tools. And we ought to tell ourselves (parenthetically) at this point that the one reasonable and worthy use of all our machinery is just this—to follow the example of life not only in the actual organizing but in the purpose and meaning of organization. We ought to acknowledge to ourselves that unless our machinery liberates the mind and spirit of man to serve better and more freely his spiritual needs it will of a certainty enslave him. At present, because most of us are in the dark as to the direction in which life strives to conduct us, machinery is used to emancipate the few and to enslave the many. We do not know what we are doing, we do not understand what the primacy of spirit means or should mean for us all. We do not know how we ought to grow, every one of us, in the natural, that is, in the spiritual way.

Why do I venture to say that in the spiritual way we ought to grow? And what in fact is that spiritual way? Do life and experience point out the way and emphasize the 'ought'? Here we come to the gist of our whole inquiry.

If in looking back along the road on which, in these chapters, we have been trying to pick out stage after stage, we discern a governing purpose and the foreshadowing of an end; and if we also discern not only the possibility but also the means, through intellect and intuition, through action and feeling and thought, of identifying ourselves with that purpose and throwing the energy of our own lives into furthering it, we shall see both the ought and the way. We shall dimly discern, too, the promise of the end, although we do not and cannot yet know what we shall be. From the moment when the life-current driving onward and overcoming one by one the reluctances of matter along the genealogical ascent to man, reached him—homo faber, the skilful tool-maker, homo sapiens, the able thinker—from that moment the sublime purpose of all that had gone before began to be revealed.

The advance of life's main stream in all its variety of operation shows, from the beginning until now, one character and motive-principle. It begins, as we have said, by subduing to its purpose the inveterate habits of material elements, those habits we speak of as physical necessity and law, raising their status that they may be servants in new power to a freedom foreign to themselves. From subduing and assembling elements within cells it passes to the assembling of cells and lifts up these in their turn to higher place. They play their part in a commonwealth; they are servants whose habits, like those of matter, further the cause of a freedom they cannot reach. Their own relative necessity is subdued and used through their coÖperating. They promote what they neither see nor know. Finally they reach their highest function in a man's brain, where they coÖperate to carry power to an incalculably various use. There it is that life, by a very splendour of new emancipation, passes, as the philosopher says, 'through the meshes of necessity,' passes through that net the cords of which it has itself both spun and knotted from the refractory substance of material things.

Man comes into his heritage. He inherits, we may allow ourselves to say, from the habits of elements and from the habit-memories of cells, single and corporate. He inherits from the habit-memories of every living creature in his ancestry. And each habit-memory of them all has contributed to his setting free. Now he is so far master that life has put into his hands the choice between a greater freedom still towards which its impulsive purpose has been directed from the first, and a new slavery that the man himself is able to make for himself. For—and surely we need to note this for our warning—the conduct and determination of life, which is in some small measure in the power of every creature within its manner of life, is given over to man; and the next step in emancipation is for him to take or leave as he will. He may dominate the whole chain of habits and go forward; or he may wind it about him and entangle his spirit in its fetters.

Matter, his body, the habits or habit-memories he inherits or makes for himself, all these may either be instruments of his growing liberation or machines that turn him to the likeness of themselves. The pianist who has wrought his music into the living instrumentality of his fingers may leave his fingers to work as mechanism, or he may pour into their established habit the riches and beauty of an artistic soul. Thus it is with all the heritage and possessions of a man. He may submit to them as to a constraining mechanism and grow mechanical himself, or he may infuse them with his spirit and raise them and himself to that further altitude which spirit seeks. We may well say of some men that they are the slaves of habit; we may well think more than we do of the many kinds of habit to which men may be slaves.

To look on heredity as an affair of transmitted habit-memories is to discover our true relation with it, once we have come to see what the spiritual memory of an enduring and accumulating spiritual life, lived according to its proper meaning, may be for man. In the chick the inherited habit-memory of its race is as the boundary wall of cellulose is for the plant-cell; in the child it is a standing ground from which, while his creative spirit stirs within him, he surveys the kingdoms of a world. In the man, like the habits he himself builds up, it may come to be a hill-top from which he looks down upon all those kingdoms and their glory. Life incurred death when first the cells were summoned out of solitude to work together in a body. And here, too, it is as though it foresaw what was coming, saw in a vision a creature come to being who should have life in himself and be divinely discontent, seeking to go on. It is hard to think that a creative impulse beginning so low down, so humbly, and yet purposive enough and skilful and potent enough to reach the immeasurable wonder and promises of man, should ever have been blind, or in the last resort should be no more and no greater than himself.