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This question is not only of importance in itself, as helping to explain the origin and source of man's supremacy in nature his tool-using faculty but it is also of interest from the light it casts on that fallacy of poor Charles Reade's already alluded to that we ought all of us in this respect to hark back to the condition of savages.
Here may we not, for a moment, interrupt the stream of Oratory with a remark, that this Definition of the Tool-using Animal appears to us, of all that Animal-sort, considerably the precisest and best? Man is called a Laughing Animal: but do not the apes also laugh, or attempt to do it; and is the manliest man the greatest and oftenest laugher? Teufelsdrockh himself, as we said, laughed only once.
He may even have considered that his ability to play on this instrument of the tinsmith's went far to put him on an equality with some who boast themselves the only tool-using animals. True, the pan was battered and rusty; but it was resonant, for all that, and day after day he pleased himself with beating reveille upon it.
In the first of these aspects we shall see man as a maker, an inventor, an artist; in the second as a subject or a citizen, a slave or a free man, in the Industrial Commonwealth. Man as a maker or producer carries us back to the dawn of history. Man is a tool-using animal and the early stages of human history are a record of the elaboration of tools.
Unless some more indubitable relics are found, we must place the advent of man as a tool-using animal at a much later date. How far back he may have existed as a man-like biped is another question, which we are not likely soon to solve. It is scarcely necessary to pursue this branch of our subject farther.
If we do not give him the benefit of the sudden mutation theory of the origin of species, then think of the slow process, hair by hair, as it were, by which a tailed, apelike arboreal animal was transformed into a hairless, tailless, erect, tool-using, fire-using, speech-forming animal.
Man is a tool-using animal; but tools are always only a means to an end, the latter prompting even their invention. Hence a course in tool manipulation only, with persistent refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly, hollow, artificial institutions.
Till quite recently Nature had her own sanctuaries, where man either did not go at all or only as a tool-using animal in comparatively small numbers. But now, in this machinery age, there is no place left where man cannot go with overwhelming forces at his command. He can strangle to death all the nobler wild life in the world to-day.
Man is the tool-using animal, the word-using animal, the animal of artifice and reason, and the only possible "return to Nature" for him if we scrutinize the phrase would be a return to the scratching, promiscuous, arboreal simian.
Emerson is the last man we should expect to be guilty of misinterpreting Nature, yet he does so at times. He does so in this passage: "If Nature wants a thumb, she makes it at the cost of the arms and legs." As if the arm were weaker or less efficient because of the thumb. What would man's power be as a tool-using animal without his strong, opposable thumb? His grasp would be gone.
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