Manual Work

Manual Work
The proposition that manual, work is a rationally directed activity sounds plausible enough, yet it raises interesting difficulties.

A dam can be built according to the plans and computations of an engineer but long before engineers existed beavers already knew how to build dams.

Unless we most arbitrarily attribute reason to beavers we must admit that a dam can be built in nonrational fashion, by instinct and animal intelligence.

We are all familiar with cases, occurring even in modern industry, in which a man of much experience and little learning may be more successful in a particular operation or process than a freshly trained engineer.

Rational direction of work, however, is by no means excluded in such a comparison, as both men know in some sense what they are doing.

Indeed, examples, of sheer “empirical skill” are not easy to find.

The fact is that the relation of manual work to its rule admits of how significantly different forms.
The operations though which a man acts directly upon physical nature may be regulated by his own reason, but also happens that the rules of such an operation remain unknown to the worker, except insofar as they are present in his habits.
Manual Work