Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/94

 than they in the scale of consciousness yet began to do what none of them had done. No bird has made a new wing, no wild beast has forged a new tooth or paw. These do not project themselves. But this feeble creature, the ancestor of man, began to project himself, and in doing so climbed, as it were, out of that lower self, reached beyond it, and began to understand it.

It was certainly not the desire to know himself which induced the ancestor of man to make his first tool. He wanted to strike, to pull, to tear—not to know himself! He stumbled on the new track driven by the primal hungers. His hand was doubtless very unlike the hand of the latter-day man—the fingers more locked or webbed, as they are even to-day in the hands of some children. And for ages the tools he made seem to reflect this hard narrow hand and locked fingers in the heavy stone axe, the stone hatchets and hammers of the stone period.