ould not be attached
to them. The layman is often apt to esteem too highly the nature of
skilled specialist work. A locomotive superintendent of a railway was
recently questioned as to the quality of engine-driving. "After twenty
years' experience he declared emphatically that the very best
engine-drivers were those who were most mechanical and unintelligent
in their work, who cared least about the internal mechanism of the
engine."[220] Yet engine-driving is far less mechanical and monotonous
than ordinary tending of machinery.

So far as the man follows the machine and has his work determined for
him by mechanical necessity, the educative pressure of the latter
force must be predominant. Machinery, like everything else, can only
teach what it practises. Order, exactitude, persistence, conformity to
unbending law,--these are the lessons which must emanate from the
machine. They have an important place as elements in the formation of
intellectual and moral character. But of themselves they contribute a
one-sided and very imperfect education. Machinery can exactly
reproduce; it can, therefore, teach the lesson of exact reproduction,
an education of quantitative measurements. The defect of machinery,
from the educative point of view, is its absolute conservatism. The
law of machinery is a law of statical order, that everything conforms
to a pattern, that present actions precisely resemble past and future
actions. Now the law of human life is dynamic, requiring order not as
valuable in itself, but as the condition of progress. The law of human
life is that no experience, no thought or feeling is an exact copy of
any other. Therefore, if you confine a man to expending his energy in
trying to conform exactly to the movements of a machine, you teach him
to abrogate the very principle of life. Variety is of the essence of
life, and machinery is the enemy of variety. This is no argument
against the educative uses of machinery, but only against the
exaggeration of these uses. If a workman expend a reasonable portion
of his energy in following the movements of a machine, he may gain a
considerable educational value; but he must also have both time and
energy left to cultivate the spontaneous and progressive arts of life.

Sec. 5. It is often urged that the tendency of machinery is not merely
to render monotonous the activity of the individual worker, but to
reduce the individual differences in workers. This criticism finds
expr