§ 4. Now to come to the question of "monotony." Is the net tendency of machinery to make labour more monotonous or less, to educate the worker or to brutalise him? Does labour become more intellectual under the machine? Professor Marshall, who has thoughtfully discussed this question, inclines in favour of machinery. It takes away manual skill, but it substitutes higher or more intellectual forms of skill.[210] "The more delicate the machine's power the greater is the judgment and carefulness which is called for from those who see after it."[211] Since machinery is daily becoming more and more delicate, it would follow that the tending of machinery would become more and more intellectual. The judgment of Mr. Cooke Taylor, in the conclusion of his admirable work, _The Modern Factory System_, is the same. "If man were merely an intellectual animal, even only a moral and intellectual one, it could scarcely be denied, it seems to us, that the results of the factory system have been thus far elevating."[212] Mr. Taylor indeed admits of the operative population that "they have deteriorated artistically; but art is a matter of faculty, of perception, of aptitude, rather than of intellect." This strange severance of Art from Intellect and Morals, especially when we bear in mind that Life itself is the finest and most valuable of Arts, will scarcely commend itself to deeper students of economic movements. The fuller significance of this admission will appear when the widest aspect of the subject is discussed in our final chapter. The question of the net intellectual effects of machinery is not one which admits of positive answer. It would be open to one to admit with Mr. Taylor that the operatives were growing more intellectual, and that their contact with machinery exercises certain educative influences, but to deny that the direct results of machinery upon the workers were favourable to a wide cultivation of intellectual powers, as compared with various forms of freer and less specialised manual labour. The intellectualisation of the town operatives (assuming the process to be taking place) may be attributable to the thousand and one other influences of town life rather than to machinery, save indirectly so far as the modern industrial centre is itself the creation of machinery.[213] It is not, I think, possible at present to offer any clear or definite judgment. But the following distinctions seem to have some weight in forming our opinion.