Moby Dick

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say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of
unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so
much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to
it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by
a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure
manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early
oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of
those unreasoning but still highly useful, MULTUM IN PARVO, Sheffield
contrivances, assuming the exterior--though a little swelled--of a
common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes,
but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers,
nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part
of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the
legs, and there they were.

Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,