It is so with all the crafts, and they are inseparably dependent one on another. The mason waits on the carpenter for his mallet, and the carpenter on the smith for his saw; the smith on the smelter for his iron, and the smelter on the miner for his ore. Each, moreover, needs the help of all the others; —the carpenter the smith, as much as the smith the carpenter; and both the mason, as much as the mason both. This helplessness of the single craftsman is altogether peculiar to the human artist. The lower animals are all poly artists, amongst whom there are no degrees of skill; and they have never heard of such a doctrine as that of the division of labour.
The industrialness, then, of man, is carried out in a way quite peculiar to himself, and singularly illustrative of his combined weakness and greatness. The most helpless, physically, of animals, and yet the one with the greatest number of pressing appetites and desires, he has no working instincts (at least after infancy) to secure the gratification of his most pressing wants, and no tools which such instincts can work by. He is compelled, therefore, to fall back upon the powers of his reason and understanding, and make his intellect serve him instead of a crowd of instinctive impulses, and his intellect-guided hand instead of an apparatus of tools. Before that hand, armed with the tools which it has fashioned, and that intellect, which marks man as made in the image of God, the instincts and weapons of the entire animal creation are as nothing. He reigns, by right of conquest, as indisputably as by right of inheritance, the king of this world.