Without question, it is the business of educators to determine whether such features of industry as machinery and the division of labor are fundamentally opposed to growth or whether they are opposed only in the way in which they have been put to use and directed.  We can discover whether or not these features are opposed only as the people concerned have the chance to master them and undertake, through their experience, to turn them to account.

Because industry has been impersonalized and the mechanics of associated effort in industry worked out in such large measure, it is to-day possible to conceive of spiritual as well as physical association in productive enterprise.  A difficulty in the way of this conception, aside from the business complex, is our habit of thinking exclusively of creative effort as an individual expression.  In describing the individual expression we would say that a man may create a machine but that when men jointly produce one they work.  The creative act is in the conception of the machine in conjunction with its construction, and the conception, after our habit of thinking, is an individual and isolated achievement.  As a matter of fact it frequently is.  A man may create a machine if he conceives it and constructs it or if he conceives and directs its construction.  Those he directs, those who do the work of construction alone, do not participate in the creative act, as the creative act is the concentrated intellectual and emotional expression and effort to produce an article or idea.  The creative impulse is concerned with the transforming of a concept or some material into an expanded concept or a new object.  The creative impulse itself finds its satisfaction in the process of completion and loses its force when the concept or object is produced.  The use of the concept or object created is not a characteristic of the creative but of the social impulse.  A man who is interested in the use or application of a product, the value it has for others, possesses the social impulse as well as the creative.  One impulse is intensive and the other extensive.

But the creative effort is not necessarily an individual matter.  It may be possible for a group of people to associate cordially and freely together with a single creative purpose and endeavor.  It may be possible for each worker to experience the joy of creative work as he takes part with others in the planning of the work along with the labor of fabrication.  It is a creative experience or dull labor as his association with others in the solution of the problem is freely pursued and genuine, or as it is forced and perfunctory.