For instance,
throughout the history of industry we find the fundamental tendency to
transpose all activities from the great muscles to the small muscles.
Any activity which is performed with the robust muscles of the
shoulder when it can be done with the lower arm, or labor which is
demanded from the muscles of the lower arm when it can just as well be
carried out by the fingers, certainly involves a waste of
psychophysical energy. A stronger psychophysical excitement is
necessary in order to secure the innervation of the big muscles in the
central nervous system. This difference in the stimulation of the
various muscle groups has been of significant consequence for the
differentiation of work throughout the development of mankind.[25]
Labor with the large muscles has, for these psychophysical reasons,
never been easily combined with the subtler training of the finer
muscles. Hence a social organization which obliged the men to give
their energy to war and the hunt, both, in primitive life, functions
of the strongest muscles, made it necessary for the domestic
activities, which are essentially functions of the small muscles, to
be carried out by women. The whole history of the machine demonstrates
this economic tendency to make activities dependent upon those muscles
which presuppose the smallest psychophysical effort. It is not only
the smaller effort which gives economic advantage to the stimulation
of the smaller muscles, but the no less important circumstance that
the psychophysical after-effect of their central excitement exerts
less inhibition than the after-effect of the brain excitement for the
big muscles.
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