The motto on the MIT seal, "Mens et Manus" - "mind and hand" - signals the Institute's dedication to what MIT founder William Barton Rogers called "the most earnest cooperation of intelligent culture with industrial pursuits." Mind and Hand traces the ideas about science and education that have shaped MIT and defined its mission - from the new science of the Enlightenment era and the ideals of representative democracy spurred by the Industrial Revolution to new theories on the nature and role of higher education in nineteenth-century America. MIT emerged in mid-century as an experiment in scientific and technical education, with its origins in the tension between these old and new ideas. After exploring MIT's European intellectual antecedents, the book examines the influence of nineteenth-century intellectual trends on William Barton Rogers and his family. It describes the beginnings of MIT in Boston's Back Bay as a three-part enterprise made up of a society of arts, a museum of arts (the "central feature" of the early plan) and a school of industrial science, and it examines the faculty, students, and curriculum through 1870.
Mind and Hand was undertaken by Julius Stratton after his retirement from the presidency of MIT and continued by Loretta Mannix after his death; Philip N. Alexander, of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, stepped in to complete the work. The combined efforts of these three authors have given us what Julius Stratton envisioned - "a coherent account of the flow of ideas" from which MIT emerged.