timelets

An animal more like the gods than these,
more intellectually capable
and able to control the other beasts,
had not as yet appeared: now man was born,
either because the framer of all things,
the fabricator of this better world,
created man out of his own divine
substance—or else because Prometheus
took up a clod (so lately broken off
from lofty aether that it still contained
some elements in common with its kin),
and mixing it with water, molded it
into the shape of gods, who govern all.
And even though all other animals
lean forward and look down toward the ground,
he gave to man a face that is uplifted,
and ordered him to stand erect and look
directly up into the vaulted heavens
and turn his countenance to meet the stars;

Ovid. “Metamorphoses.”

PROMETHEUS: ...they knew nothing of making brick-knitted houses the sun warms, nor how to work in wood. What’s more, I gave them numbering, chief of all the stratagems. And the painstaking, putting together of letters...

47. But what are the simple constituent parts of which reality is composed? What are the simple constituent parts of a chair? The pieces of wood from which it is assembled? Or the molecules, or the atoms? “Simple” means: not composite. And here the point is: in what sense ‘composite’? It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the ‘simple parts of a chair’.

...
Asking “Is this object composite?” outside a particular game is like what a boy once did when he had to say whether the verbs in certain sentences were in the active or passive voice, and who racked his brains over the question whether the verb “to sleep”, for example, meant something active or passive.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations. 4ed. p 26