These are the primordial
cells of mechanics. And an organ is only another name for a tool.
Organs and Makeshifts
I have gone out sketching and forgotten my water-dipper; among my
traps I always find something that will do, for example, the top of
my tin case (for holding pencils). This is how organs come to change
their uses and hence their forms, or at any rate partly how.
Joining and Disjoining
These are the essence of change.
One of the earliest notes I made, when I began to make notes at all,
I found not long ago in an old book, since destroyed, which I had in
New Zealand. It was to the effect that all things are either of the
nature of a piece of string or a knife. That is, they are either for
bringing and keeping things together, or for sending and keeping them
apart. Nevertheless each kind contains a little of its opposite and
some, as the railway train and the hedge, combine many examples of
both. Thus the train, on the whole, is used for bringing things
together, but it is also used for sending them apart, and its
divisions into classes are alike for separating and keeping together.
The hedge is also both for joining things (as a flock of sheep) and
for disjoining (as for keeping the sheep from getting into corn).
These are the more immediate ends. The ulterior ends, both of train
and hedge, so far as we are concerned, and so far as anything can
have an end, are the bringing or helping to bring meat or dairy
produce into contact with man's inside, or wool on to his back, or
that he may go in comfort somewhere to converse with people and join
his soul on to theirs, or please himself by getting something to come
within the range of his senses or imagination.
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