Free The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski Page A

action of the hand, and the splitting or analyticaction of the hand.
    It seems the most natural thing in the world to take some clay and mould it into a ball, a little clay figure, a cup, a pit house. At first we feel that the shape of nature has been given us by this. But, of course, it has not. This is the man-made shape. What the pot does is to reflect the cupped hand; what the pit house does is to reflect the shaping action of man. And nothinghas been discovered about nature herself when man imposes these warm, rounded, feminine, artistic shapes on her. The only thing that you reflect is the shape of your own hand.
    But there is another action of the human hand which is different and opposite. That is the splitting of wood or stone; for by that action the hand (armed with a tool) probes and explores beneath the surface, and therebybecomes an instrument of discovery. There is a great intellectual step forward when man splits a piece of wood, or a piece of stone, and lays bare the print that nature had put there before hesplit it. The Pueblo people found that step in the red sandstone cliffs that rise a thousand feet over the Arizona settlements. The tabular strata were there for the cutting; and the blocks were laid incourses along the same bedding planes in which they had lain in the cliffs of the Canyon de Chelly.
    From an early time man made tools by working the stone. Sometimes the stone had a natural grain, sometimes the toolmaker created the lines of cleavage by learning how to strike the stone. It may be that the idea comes, in the first place, from splitting wood, because wood is a material with a visiblestructure which opens easily along the grain, but which is hard to shear across the grain. And from that simple beginning man prises open the nature of things and uncovers the laws that the structure dictates and reveals. Now the hand no longer imposes itself on the shape of things. Instead, it becomes an instrument of discovery and pleasure together, in which the tool transcends its immediateuse and enters into and reveals the qualities and the forms that lie hidden in the material. Like a man cutting a crystal, we find in the form within the secret laws of nature.
    The notion of discovering an underlying order in matter is man’s basic concept for exploring nature. The architecture of things reveals a structure below the surface, a hidden grain which, when it is laid bare, makes itpossible to take natural formations apart and assemble them in new arrangements. For me this is the step in the ascent of man at which theoretical science begins. And it is as native to the way man conceives his own communities as it is to his conception of nature.
    We human beings are joined in families, the families are joined in kinship groups, the kinship groups in clans, the clans in tribes,the tribes in nations. And that sense of hierarchy, of a pyramid in which layer is imposed on layer, runs through all the ways that we look at nature. The fundamental particles make nuclei, the nuclei join in atoms, the atoms join in molecules, the molecules join in bases, the bases direct the assembly of amino acids, the amino acids join in proteins. We find again in nature something which seemsprofoundly to correspond to the way in which our own social relations join us.
    The Canyon de Chelly is a kind of microcosm of the cultures, and its high point was reached when the Pueblo people built the great structures just after AD 1000. They represent not only an understanding of nature in the stonework, but of human relations; because the Pueblo people formed here and elsewhere a kind ofminiature city. The cliff dwellings were sometimes terraced to five or six storeys, with the top floors recessed from the lower ones. The front of the block was flat with the cliff, the back bowed back into the cliff. These large architectural complexes sometimes have a ground plan of two or three acres, and are made up of four hundred rooms or more.
    Stones make a