When we learn to write, the fashion and shape of every _a_, _b_ and _c_ have to be thought over; the hands learn painfully to follow an order sent down from the central thinking power in the cerebrum, sent down on information derived through the sensory centres behind the eye, of the shape of the copy. But in ordinary life we could copy pages of manuscript and talk and think about something else the whole time. There is a direct line of nerve flow between the reading apparatus behind the eye and the writing apparatus behind the hand; and thought is not required. We have become so far automatic; we have created a convenient writing machine within us, which works for us and leaves us free to do other things. So that if we spend our nine hours a day at working a printing machine, or stitching leather or silk, or boring holes, or driving in nails, or sharpening a tool’s edge, or wrapping boxes, or counting or piecing threads, we are really doing the work of a machine. We do not think: to think would interfere with the sure regularity of our work. Now the growth of this division of labour has been quite irresistible. Its advantages have been such that no manufacturer or nation of manufacturers could stand without it. The social organism has become more complex, and with that the differentiation of function has become more marked. It is a necessary accompaniment of an elaborate social state; and whether it tends or not to the welfare of the individual it greatly extends the productive power of the industrial organism, and so strengthens the organism itself viewed as industrial simply. Thus the highly differentiated organism has survived, though it may have sacrificed the individual worker, regarded as a human being. Is there, therefore, any means whereby we can modify the work of the monotonous mechanical labourer so as to give him some pleasure in it, and afford exercise to his other faculties besides that one called out by the single narrow function he has learnt to repeat day after day? If we can give scope for his higher faculties, his judgment, his invention, his knowledge, we shall be avoiding the present waste by which faculties which might aid production in better ways are wasted on routine.