In the working of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational mani… - Lewis Mumford

But if tools were actually central to mental growth beyond purely animal needs, how is it that those primitive peoples, like the Australian Bushmen, who have the most rudimentary technology, nevertheless exhibit elaborate religious ceremonials, an extremely complicated kinship organization, and a complex and differentiated language? Why, further, were highly developed cultures, like those of the Maya, the Aztecs, the Peruvians, still using only the simplest handicraft equipment, though they were capable of constructing superbly planned works of engineering and architecture, like the road to Machu Pichu and Machu Pichu itself? And how is it that the Maya, who had neither machines nor draught animals, were not only great artists but masters of abstruse mathematical calculations.

More than one recent observer has pointed out that the prospective achievement of universal leisure, with the six-hour day and the five-day week, carries the threat of intolerable emptiness and boredom. The hope expressed by Julian Huxley and others that this vacancy will be profitably filled by continued studies in the school and the university, to use the time once occupied by office or factory work, over-rates both the attraction and the nutritive value of such fare, and fails to take note of the ominous rebellion against it already manifested by those college students who find no joy in exercising their minds, and who would rather dull them by drugs or stone them by violent sounds.

There is no necessary connection between the important events of a life and the records of it that have been preserved in memory, in documents, in memorials, or in living testimony. The biographer must compose his life of what he has, just as the archeologist must restore his temple or his statue with such fragments as thieving time and careless men have left him; but fate often ironically leaves him a well-preserved leg and a dismembered torso, while the head, which would supply the main clue to the body, is missing. Hence, in addition to the purposive selection exercised by the subject himself and by the biographer in making use of such materials as are left, there exists a purely external selection dominated by chance, which cuts across the evidence in an arbitrary fashion. To correct for such distortions the biographer must be an anatomist of character: he must be able to restore the missing nose in plaster, even if he does not find the original marble.