. In the inventor's intellectual equipment there was actively
present the kinetic use-value of "bound-up-time," enabling him to discover
the laws of heat, water, and steam; and he employed both the potential and
kinetic use-values of mechanical instruments, methods of work, and
scientific knowledge of his time and generation--use-values of wealth
created by the genius and toil of by-gone generations. This invention was
not produced, let us say 6000 years ago, because civilization was not then
sufficiently advanced: mathematically considered, the production of this
great use-value had to await all the accumulated work of six thousand
years of human ingenuity and human labor. So, if we choose, the steam
engine may be considered a kinetic use-value in which the factor of time
is equal to something like 6000 years, or let us say roughly 200
generations.

It is obvious that, in one life time, even a genius of the highest order,
could not, in aboriginal conditions, have invented and built a steam
engine, when everything, even iron, was unknown. Of course if the same
inventor could have had a life of several thousands of years and could
have consecutively followed up all the processes, unhampered by the
prejudices of those days, and been able to make all of these inventions by
himself, he would represent in himself all the progress of civilization.

By this illustration we see the profound meaning of the words--the living
powers of the dead; we see the grave importance in human life of the
factor TIME; we behold the significance of the time-binding capacity of
man. The steam engine is to be seen anew, as in the main the accumulated
production of dead-men's work. The life of one generation is short, and
were it not for our human capacity to inherit the material and spiritual
fruit of dead men's toil, to augment it a little in the brief span of our
own lives, and to transmit it to posterity, the process of civilization
would not be possible and our present estate would be that of aboriginal
man. Civilization is a creature, its creator is the time-binding power of
man. Animals have it not, because they belong to a lower type or dimension
of life.

Sophistry avails nothing here; a child, left in the woods, would be and
remain a savage, matching his wits with gorillas. He becomes a civilized
man only by the accumulation of, and acquaintance with dead men's work;
for then and only then can he start where the preceding generation le