And with the direction of labour generally, whether in the production of machinery or the use of the machinery in the production of goods for the public, the case is again the same. We have manual labour of a given kind and quality, which assists in producing what is wanted or not wanted--what is so much wealth or simply so much refuse, in accordance with the manner in which all this labour is directed by faculties specifically different from those exercised by the manual labourers themselves. And now we are in a position to sum up in a brief and decisive formula what the difference between the sets of faculties thus contrasted is. It is not essentially a difference between lower and higher, for some forms of labour, such as that of the great painter, may be morally higher than some forms of direction. The difference is one not of degree, but of kind, and includes two different psycho-physical processes. Labour, from the most ordinary up to the rarest kind, _is the mind or the brain of one man affecting that man's own hands_, and the single task on which his hands happen to be engaged. The directive faculties are _the mind or the brain of one man simultaneously affecting the hands of any number of other men_, and through their hands the simultaneous tasks of all of them, no matter how various these tasks may be. CHAPTER IV THE ERRORS OF MARX, CONTINUED. CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF ABILITY The human activities and faculties, then, which are involved in the production of modern wealth, are not, as Marx says--and as the orthodox economists said, whom he rightly calls his masters, and as their followers still say--of one kind--namely, those embodied in the individual task-work of the individual, to which Marx, Ricardo, and Mill alike give the name of "labour"; they are of two kinds. And this, indeed, the earlier economists recognised, as we may see by Mill's casual admission that the progress of industrial effort depends before all things on thought and the advance of knowledge. But they recognised the fact in a general way only. How thought and knowledge affected the industrial process they made no attempt to explain, otherwise than by comprehending them on occasion under the common name of labour, which they assigned throughout most of their arguments to manual task-work only.