But we must not overlook another feature in the development of
technique. The machines have been constantly transformed in the
direction which made it possible to secure the greatest help from the
natural cooerdination of bodily movements. The physiological
organization and the psychophysical conditions of the nervous system
make it necessary that the movement impulses flow over into motor side
channels and thus produce accessory effects without any special
effort. If a machine is so constructed that these natural accessory
movements must be artificially and intentionally suppressed, it means,
on the one side, a waste of available psychophysical energy, and on
the other side it demands a useless effort in order to secure this
inhibition. The industrial development has moved toward both the
fructification of those side impulses and the avoidance of these
inhibitions. It has adjusted itself practically to the natural
psychical conditions. Ultimately it is this tendency which shaped the
technical apparatus for the economic work until the muscle movements
could become rhythmical. The rhythmical activity necessarily involves
a psychophysical saving and this saving has been instinctively secured
throughout the history of civilization. All rhythm contains a
repetition of movement without making a real repetition of the
psychophysical impulse necessary. In the rhythmical activity a large
part of the first excitement still serves for the second, and the
second for the third.
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