Note 9 — LETTER LXVII.
Reading edition
Foolish people are continually quibbling and stupifying themselves about the word ‘machine.’ Briefly, any instrument is a machine so far as its action is, in any particular, or moment, beyond the control of the human hand. A violin, a pencil, and a plough, are tools, not machines. A grinding organ, or a windmill, is a machine, not a tool: often the two are combined; thus a lathe is a machine, and the workman’s chisel, used at it, a tool. ↑