Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/729

 INDIVIDUAL TELES IS 713

the organic appliances has sufficed to enable the species possessing it to migrate far from the region to which it was originally adapted. Man, on the other hand, without acquiring any new organic adaptations, but by the inven- tion of tools, by providing himself clothing and shelter, by artificial devices for capturing prey, and by other ways of transforming his environment, has placed himself in position to occupy the whole earth from the equator to the arctic circle, and to become the only animal that is not restricted in its hab- itat.

Every implement of human design is calculated to take advantage of some mechanical principle through which the muscular force necessary to be exerted is less for any given result accomplished than it would be without such implement. In most cases it is many times less, but in the great majority of cases no result could be produced at all without the implement. Machines are simply more effective tools, and it is through tools and machin- ery that the arts have been established, The utter helplessness of man with- out the arts is well illustrated by De Foe in Robinson Crusoe, and yet in order to enable him to survive at all, even in a tropical climate where nature's pro- ductions were exuberant, he must provide himself from the stores of the wrecked vessel with a considerable supply of tools and other artificial appli- ances. What was true of Robinson Crusoe thus circumstanced is much more true of the great majority of mankind who inhabit what we call temperate climates, /. e., climates in which the temperature sometimes falls ten or twenty degrees below the freezing point. One winter without art would suf- fice to sweep the whole population north or south of the thirtieth parallel of latitude out of existence.

We are so much accustomed to the terms labor and production that we rarely stop to think what they really mean. Neither of these terms has any place in natural economics. All labor consists in an artificial transformation of man's environment. Nature produces nothing in the politico-economic sense of the word. Production consists in artificially altering the form of natural objects. The clothes we wear are chiefly derived from the sheep, the ox, the silkworm and a few other animals, the cotton plant, flax, hemp, and a few other plants ; but between the latest stage at which nature leaves these and the final form in which they are ready for use, the steps are many and the labor great. The dwellings man inhabits once consisted chiefly of trees, clay, and beds of solid rock. These have been transformed by labor per- formed with tools and machinery into houses. The same is true of temples and of all the other buildings that now cover the surface of the earth wher- ever man is found. And so the entire cycle of human achievement might be gone through. All these transformations are accomplished through the arts.

The sum total of human arts constitutes man's material civilization, and it is this that chiefly distinguishes him from the rest of nature. But the arts are the exclusive product of mind. They are the means through which intclli-