The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

A tool is anything whatsoever which is used by an intelligent being for realising its object.  The idea of a desired end is inseparable from a tool.  The very essence of a tool is the being an instrument for the achievement of a purpose.  We say that a man is the tool of another, meaning that he is being used for the furtherance of that other’s ends, and this constitutes him a machine in use.  Therefore the word “tool” implies also the existence of a living, intelligent being capable of desiring the end for which the tool is used, for this is involved in the idea of a desired end.  And as few tools grow naturally fit for use (for even a stick or a fuller’s teasel must be cut from their places and modified to some extent before they can be called tools), the word “tool” implies not only a purpose and a purposer, but a purposer who can see in what manner his purpose can be achieved, and who can contrive (or find ready-made and fetch and employ) the tool which shall achieve it.

Strictly speaking, nothing is a tool unless during actual use.  Nevertheless, if a thing has been made for the express purpose of being used as a tool it is commonly called a tool, whether it is in actual use or no.  Thus hammers, chisels, etc., are called tools, though lying idle in a tool-box.  What is meant is that, though not actually being used as instruments at the present moment, they bear the impress of their object, and are so often in use that we may speak of them as though they always were so.  Strictly, a thing is a tool or not a tool just as it may happen to be in use or not.  Thus a stone may be picked up and used to hammer a nail with, but the stone is not a tool until picked up with an eye to use; it is a tool as soon as this happens, and, if thrown away immediately the nail has been driven home, the stone is a tool no longer.  We see, therefore, matter alternating between a toolish or organic state and an untoolish or inorganic.  Where there is intention it is organic, where there is no intention it is inorganic.  Perhaps, however, the word “tool” should cover also the remains of a tool so long as there are manifest signs that the object was a tool once.

The simplest tool I can think of is a piece of gravel used for making a road.  Nothing is done to it, it owes its being a tool simply to the fact that it subserves a purpose.  A broken piece of granite used for macadamising a road is a more complex instrument, about the toolishness of which no doubt can be entertained.  It will, however, I think, be held that even a piece of gravel found in situ and left there untouched, provided it is so left because it was deemed suitable for a road which was designed to pass over the spot, would become a tool in virtue of the recognition of its utility, while a similar piece of gravel a yard off on either side the proposed road would not be a tool.

The essence of a tool, therefore, lies in something outside the tool itself.  It is not in the head of the hammer, nor in the handle, nor in the combination of the two that the essence of mechanical characteristics exists, but in the recognition of its utility and in the forces directed through it in virtue of this recognition.  This appears more plainly when we reflect that a very complex machine, if intended for use by children whose aim is not serious, ceases to rank in our minds as a tool, and becomes a toy.  It is seriousness of aim and recognition of suitability for the achievement of that aim, and not anything in the tool itself, that makes the tool.

The goodness or badness, again, of a tool depends not upon anything within the tool as regarded without relation to the user, but upon the ease or difficulty experienced by the person using it in comparison with what he or others of average capacity would experience if they had used a tool of a different kind.  Thus the same tool may be good for one man and bad for another.

It seems to me that all tools resolve themselves into the hammer and the lever, and that the lever is only an inverted hammer, or the hammer only an inverted lever, whichever one wills; so that all the problems of mechanics are present to us in the simple stone which may be used as a hammer, or in the stick that may be used as a lever, as much as in the most complicated machine.  These are the primordial cells of mechanics.  And an organ is only another name for a tool.