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Every piece of rudeness is, strictly speaking, an appeal to brutality; for it is a declaration that intellectual strength and moral insight are incompetent to decide, and that the battle must be fought out by physical force a struggle which, in the case of man, whom Franklin defines as a tool-making animal, is decided by the weapons peculiar to the species; and the decision is irrevocable.
He was thus obliged to become as alert and ready in defence as he was in attack, to associate himself more fully with his fellows in his hunting excursions and his other labors, and to adapt the forms and forces of nature still more to his needs, his career as a tool-making animal being greatly stimulated by the necessities of his situation.
Franklin said, Man was 'a tool-making animal, which is very well; for no animal but man makes a thing, by means of which he can make another thing. But this applies to very few of the species. My definition of Man is, 'a Cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgment, and all the faculties and passions of our mind in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.
An ancient philosopher said, man was a 'two-legged animal without feathers', upon which his rival sage had a cock plucked bare, and set him down in the school before all the disciples, as a 'Philosophick Man'. Dr Franklin said, man was 'a tool-making animal', which is very well; for no animal but man makes a thing, by means of which he can make another thing.
Bramah was deservedly honoured and admired as the first mechanical genius of his time, and as the founder of the art of tool-making in its highest branches.
On the other hand, "as regards tool-making, no human race is known which has not shown some faculty in this direction." "The difference is a very fundamental one," and "may be summed up in the words 'arrested development." Words, indeed! but what do they mean?
His very first contrivances to support life were tools of the simplest and rudest construction; and his latest achievements in the substitution of machinery for the relief of the human hand and intellect are founded on the use of tools of a still higher order. Hence it is not without good reason that man has by some philosophers been defined as A TOOL-MAKING ANIMAL.
The like honor was awarded to the city of Boston and the Smithsonian Institution, and to four private exhibitors for the more palpable contributions of tool-making machinery, steam-machinery, mowing-machines and dentistry. This list does not teach us much.
Only about twenty-five per cent. are even willing to be straw bosses, and most of them take that position because it carries with it more pay than working on a machine. Men of a more mechanical turn of mind, but with no desire for responsibility, go into the tool-making departments where they receive considerably more pay than in production proper. But the vast majority of men want to stay put.
When to these we add the adze, plane-irons, the anger, and the chisel, we sum up the tools principally relied on by the early mechanics for working in wood and iron. Such continued to be the chief tools in use down almost to our own day. The smith was at first the principal tool-maker; but special branches of trade were gradually established, devoted to tool-making.
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