The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

Surely the work done by the body is, in one way, more its true life than its limbs and organisation are.  Which is the more true life of a great cotton factory—­the bales of goods which it turns out for the world’s wearing or the machinery whereby its ends are achieved?  The manufacture is only possible by reason of the machinery; it is produced by this.  The machinery only exists in virtue of its being capable of producing the manufacture; it is produced for this.  The machinery represents the work done by the factory that turned it out.

Somehow or other when we think of a factory we think rather of the fabric and mechanism than of the work, and so we think of a man’s life and living body as constituting himself rather than of the work that the life and living body turn out.  The instinct being as strong as it is, I suppose it sound, but it seems as though the life should be held to be quite as much in the work itself as in the tools that produce it—­and perhaps more.