The made thing is the vehicle, record, and monument of human progress. The things we make are nearer to the human soul than is the physical body. That body is but a machine in which our nerve currents have run so long and intimately that the act is unconscious, and we say “I did this,” not “my hand did it.” If a baby could express his relation to his body in plain words, we should find him getting acquainted with it, “learning it” as one learns a bicycle or a sewing-machine. He can make it work, but he has to learn how, as he would have to learn how to row or shoot. Moreover, It has its tendencies and habits with which he has to respectfully acquaint himself that he may promote or check or change them; the tendencies and habits of a long-established animal mechanism, in which the human soul is quartered. The tools and implements in the use of which lies our humanness are scarcely more foreign to us than his hands and feet were to the baby, or than some new combination of muscular action is to the adult. We have to learn to act through sword and spear, spade and plough, knife and axe, as we had to learn to act through muscle, cord, and bone, and they become as automatically natural to us in due time. The physical body is not an end but a means. Life is the end, action; the body is what you do it with. So these material forms we make are not ends, but means. Human life is the end, and these things are what we do it with. The expression of force through higher forms, that is life’s line of progress. Our creations are all to do something in, or with, or from. Even the most perfect form of art stands as an inspiration to other human beings, is a means to better action, better living for us all. Every human product is an instrument, in using which we can more fully express the divine spirit. A house is not a final end. We do not build a house as a crowning achievement and then sit and wait upon it for the rest of life—or at least we should not! We build a house to live in, that we may work. Human life is not a means of promoting house-building; house-building is a means of promoting human life. Book, picture, statue, these are our fruit, our product, evolved through us as a means of further growth. Our “civilised” life to-day, the consciousness of an “educated,” “cultivated” person, is developed by contact with the things in which previous human beings expressed their measure of life and passed it on to us.