Synthesized answer
The "instinct of workmanship" is defined as a disposition that occupies interest with practical expedients, ways and means, devices, and contrivances for efficiency and economy, proficiency, creative work, and technological mastery of facts [1]. It involves a proclivity for taking pains and is concerned with the efficient use of means and adequate management of resources, which is itself an end of endeavor and a source of gratification [2].
Under the impulse of workmanship, an agent's interest and endeavor are focused on contriving ways and means to achieve a desired end, rather than directly pursuing the end itself [2]. It is not necessarily a simple or irreducible psychological element, but rather may signify a concurrence of several instinctive aptitudes [3]. This instinct pervades the works of man and has been crucial in bringing human life from a primitive to a more advanced state, driving the development of technology and industrial arts [5, 4].
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
alculation of causes and effects in such a case are instinctively felt to be out of touch with the spirit of the thing. They are distasteful; not only are they not part and parcel of the functional content of the generous impulse, but an undue injection of these elements of workmanship into the case may even induce a revulsion of feeling and defeat its own intention. The instinct of workmanship, on the other hand, occupies the interest with practical expedients, ways and means, devices and contrivances of efficiency and economy, proficiency, creative work and technological mastery of…
auxiliary to all the rest, to be concerned with the ways and means of life rather than with any one given ulterior end. It has essentially to do with proximate rather than ulterior ends. Yet workmanship is none the less an object of attention and sentiment in its own right. Efficient use of the means at hand and adequate management of the resources available for the purposes of life is itself an end of endeavour, and accomplishment of this kind is a source of gratification. All instinctive action is intelligent and teleological. The generality of instinctive dispositions prompt simply…
manship, which would then be held to be strongly sustained at, this point by a parental solicitude for the common good. In making use of the expression, “instinct of workmanship” or “sense of workmanship,” it is not here intended to assume or to argue that the proclivity so designated is in the psychological respect a simple or irreducible element; still less, of course, is there any intention to allege that it is to be traced back in the physiological respect to some one isolable tropismatic sensibility or some single enzymotic or visceral stimulus. All that is matter for the…
its own, but is rather concerned with the ways and means whereby instinctively given purposes are to be accomplished. According, therefore, as one or another of the instinctive dispositions is predominant in the community’s scheme of life or in the individual’s every-day interest, the habitual trend of the sense of workmanship will be bent to one or another line of proficiency and technological mastery. By cumulative habituation a bias of this character may come to have very substantial consequences for the range and scope of technological knowledge, the state of the industrial arts,…
e soil, and unremittingly dependent for their daily life on the workmanlike efficiency of all the members of the group. The prime requisite for survival under these conditions would be a propensity unselfishly and impersonally to make the most of the material means at hand and a penchant for turning all resources of knowledge and material to account to sustain the life of the group. At the outset, therefore, as it first comes into the life-history of any one or all of the racial stocks with which modern inquiry concerns itself, this instinctive disposition will have borne directly…