The position of the craftsman in the economy of that time is peculiarly suited to induce a conception of the individual workman as a creative agent standing on his own bottom, and as an ultimate, irreducible factor in the community’s make-up. He draws on the resources of his own person alone; neither his ancestry nor the favour of his neighbours have visibly yielded him anything beyond an equivalent for work done; he owes nothing to inherited wealth or prerogative, and he is bound in no relation of landlord or tenant to the soil. With his slight outfit of tools he is ready and competent of his own motion to do the work that lies before him, and he asks nothing but an even chance to do what he is fit to do. Even the training which has given him his finished skill he has come by through no special favour or advantage, having given an equivalent for it all in the work done during his apprenticeship and so having to all appearance acquired it by his own force and diligence. The common stock of technological knowledge underlying all special training was at that time still a sufficiently simple and obvious matter, so that it was readily acquired in the routine of work, without formal application to the learning of it; and any indebtedness to the community at large or to past generations for such common stock of information would therefore not be sufficiently apparent to admit of its disturbing the craftsman’s naïve appraisal of his productive capacity in the simple and complacent terms of his own person. The man who does things, who is creatively occupied with fashioning things for use, is the central fact in the scheme of things under the handicraft system, and the range of concepts by use of which the technological problems of that era are worked out is limited by the habit of mind so induced in those who have the work in hand and in those who see it done. The discipline of the crafts inculcates the apprehension of mechanical facts and processes in terms of workmanlike endeavour and achievement; so that questions as to what forces are available for use, and of how to turn them to account, present themselves in terms of muscular force and manual dexterity. Mechanical appliances for use in industry are designed and worked out as contrivances to facilitate or to abridge manual labour, and it is in terms of labour that the whole industrial system is conceived and its incidence, value and output rated.