That is the clear lesson which the student of
progress learns from the study of living Nature. Let him hold hard by
this truth, and by it let him judge that other specialization which
human society presents.
For this primary and physiological division of labour has its analogue
in a much later thing, the division of labour in human society, upon
which, indeed, the possibility of what we call human society depends.
And it is plain that the time has come when we must determine the price
that may rightly be paid for this specialization. Assuredly it is not to
be had for nothing. Dr. Minot considers that death, as a biological
fact, is the price paid for cell-differentiation. Now surely the death
of individuality is the price paid for such specialization as that of
the workman who spends his life supervising the machine which effects a
single process in the making of a pin, and has never even seen any
other but that stage in the process of making that one among all the
"number of things" of which the world is full. Here, as in a thousand
other cases, it has cost a man to make an expert.
How far we are entitled to go we shall determine only when we know what
it is that we want to attain.
If we desire an efficient, durable, numerous society, there are probably
no limits whatever that we need observe in the process of
specialization. Pins are cheaper for the sacrifice of the individual in
their making.
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