In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past, crude labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances. The kind of labour which can command its price is the kind which has trained intelligence behind it. One of the great needs of our time is the multiplication of skilled and special labour. The demand for the products of intelligence is far greater than that for mere crude products of labour, and it will be more and more so. For there comes a time when the latter products have satisfied the limit to which a man can consume food and drink and shelter,--those things which merely keep the animal alive. But to those things which minister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man there is almost no limit. The demand one can conceive is well-nigh infinite. One of the philosophical things that have been said, in discriminating man from the lower animals, is that he is the one creature who is never satisfied. It is well for him that he is so, that there is always something more for which he craves. To my mind this fact most strongly hints that man is infinitely more than a mere animate machine.
[This eminent writer is Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and of Logic at University College, London. His works published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, are "Illusions," "Outlines of Psychology with Special Reference to the Theory of Education," "Teachers' Handbook of Psychology," "The Human Mind," "Pessimism," "Children's Ways," and "Studies of Childhood." From the last mentioned work, copyright by D. Appleton & Co., the following is the introductory chapter.]
Man has always had the child with him, and one might be sure that since he became gentle and alive to the beauty of things he must have come under the spell of the baby. We have evidence beyond the oft-quoted departure of Hector and other pictures of childish grace in early literature that baby-worship and baby-subjection are not wholly things of modern times. There is a pretty story taken down by Mr. Leland from the lips of an old Indian woman, which relates how Glooskap, the hero-god, after conquering all his enemies, rashly tried his hand at managing a certain baby, Wasis by name, and how he got punished for his rashness.