¶ Hands
Index Entry
Hands:
"I did a case study of my hands. I can do things with my hands. I can cup my hands, but I need my hands for something else besides water. I found I needed water, all right, but when I went after berries I got very far away from water, and I kept getting thirsty. So I invented a vessel, and I can close it and I can carry it. This vessel can handle heats my hands cannot handle; it can handle acids my hands cannot handle; and I can make it a thousand times bigger than my hands-- I can make it ten thousand times bigger than my hands. It begins to lose its similarity to hands and people lose the realization that this exists in the universe only by virtue of man. It’s part of man.
“Man has learned, then, how to externalize his own functions and to leave them behind. So that now you can use my hands, and we can go on from generation to generation of our hands, interchangeable hands. There are no tools that man has developed that are not extensions of the original integral functions. . . .”
