d. But they cannot be strengthened, unless we are content to take
them in their feebleness, and unless we prize and honor them in their
imperfection above the best and most perfect manual skill. And this is
what we have to do with all our laborers; to look for the _thoughtful_
part of them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it,
whatever faults and errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best
that is in them cannot manifest itself, but in company with much error.
Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line,
and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy
and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and
perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you
ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find
any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating;
he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake
in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you
have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an
animated tool.

Sec. XII. And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You
must either made a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make
both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be
precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that
precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like
cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must
unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make
cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must
go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be
bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill all the
invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err
from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the
whole human being be lost at last--a heap of sawdust, so far as its
intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart,
which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after
the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if
you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let
him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing;
and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all h