As with the division of labour in the interior of the manufacturing
 workshops, so it is with the division of labour in the interior of society.
 So long as handicraft and manufacture form the general groundwork of social
 production, the subjection of the producer to one branch exclusively, the
 breaking up of the multifariousness of his employment, [223] is a necessary step in the development. On that groundwork each separate branch of production acquires empirically the form that is technically
 suited to it, slowly perfects it, and, so soon as a given degree of maturity
 has been reached, rapidly crystallises that form. The only thing, that
 here and there causes a change, besides new raw material supplied by commerce,
 is the gradual alteration of the instruments of labour. But their form,
 too, once definitely settled by experience, petrifies, as is proved by
 their being in many cases handed down in the same form by one generation
 to another during thousands of years. A characteristic feature is, that,
 even down into the eighteenth century, the different trades were called
 “mysteries” (mystères); [224] into their secrets none but those duly initiated could penetrate. modern industry rent the
 veil that concealed from men their own social process of production, and
 that turned the various, spontaneously divided branches of production into
 so many riddles, not only to outsiders, but even to the initiated. The
 principle which it pursued, of resolving each process into its constituent
 movements, without any regard to their possible execution by the hand of
 man, created the new modern science of technology. The varied, apparently
 unconnected, and petrified forms of the industri457al processes now
 resolved themselves into so many conscious and systematic applications
 of natural science to the attainment of given useful effects. Technology
 also discovered the few main fundamental forms of motion, which, despite
 the diversity of the instruments used, are necessarily taken by every productive
 action of the human body; just as the science of mechanics sees in the
 most complicated machinery nothing but the continual repetition of the
 simple mechanical powers.