¶ Continuous Man (1)
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Index Entry
"I have given the name ‘continuous man’ to the slowly accumulating total world experience and total literate knowledge regarding all the discovered physical resources and generalized patterning principles-- in contradistinction to the illiterate, discontinuous man, local in time and geography, whose nonrelayed, experience-won knowledge limited his tool capabilities to devices which any one individual might invent entirely on his own initiative, starting nakedly in the wilderness. My definition of industry is a tool-regenerating complex in which none of the tools could be produced, operated, or used by one man-- for example, the Queen Mary, Grand Coulee dam, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, etc.
“All around the world are found unbelievably large heaps of artifacts of discontinuous man, each, in effect, starting all over again learning a little, incorporating the little in hand-crafted tools, dying without comprehension of aught but the local limitations and inadequacies of his infinitely surrounded and apparently exclusive local reality.”
