CHAPTER I.
CULTURAL PREPARATION
1: Machines L'titilies, and "The Machine"
Durinji the last century the automatic or se^ni automatic machine has iimie to occupy a large place in our daily routine; and we have tended to attribute to the physical instrument itself the whole complex of habit- and methods that created it and accompanied iu Almost every <1 ivi u~-ion of technology Írom Marx onward has tended to overemphasize the part played by the more mobile and active pail- ot our industrial equipment, and has flighted other equally critical elements in our technical heritage.
WTiat is a machine? Apart ÍTom the simple machines oi classic mechanics, the inclined plane, the pulley, and so forth, the subject remains a contused one. Many ot the writers who have discussed the machine age have treated the. machine as if it were a very recent phenomenon, and as it' the technology of handicraft had employed only tools tu transform the environment. These preconceptions axe baseless. For the la-l three thousand years, at least, machines have been an cs-cnlial part of our older technical heritage. Reuleaux's definition of a machine has remained a classic: "A machine is* combination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain* determinant motions"; but it does not take v very far. Its place is due to his importance ** the first great morphologist of machine*, for it leaves out the large cJnss of ma* chines operated by man-power.
Machines have developed out of a complex of Don-organic ageA for converting energy, for performing work, for enlarging the ■**
9
10 technics and civilization
chanieal or sensory capacities of the human body, or for reducing to a mensurable order and regularity the processes of lift1. The automaton j> the last step in a process that began wilh the use of one part or another of the human body as a tool. In back of the development of tools and machines lies the attempt to modify the environment in such a way as to fortify and sustain the human organism: the effort is either to extend the powers of the otherwise unarmed organism, or to manufacture outside of the body a set of conditions more favorable toward maintaining its equilibrium and ensuring its survival. Instead of a physiological adaptation to the cold, like the growth of hair or the habit of hibernation, there is an environmental adaptation, such as that made possible by the use of clothes and the erection of shelter
The essential distinction between a machine and a tool lies in the degree of independence in the operation from the skill and motive power of the operator: the tool lends itself to manipulation, the machine to automatic action. The degree of complexity is unimportant: for, using the tool, the human hand and eye perform complicated actions which are the equivalent, in function, of a well developed machine; while, on the other hand, there are highly effective machines, like the drop hammer, which do very simple tasks, with the aid of a. relatively simple mechanism. The difference between tools and machines lies primarily in the degree of automatism they have reached: tiie skilled tool-user becomes more accurate and more automatic, in short, more mechanical, as his originally voluntary motions settle down into reflexes, and on the other hand, even hi the most completely automatic machine, there must intervene same-where, at the beginning and the end of the process, first in the original design, and finally in the ability to overcome defects and to make repairs, the conscious participation of a human agent.
Moreover, between the tool and the machine there stands another class of objects, the machine-tool: here, in the lathe or the drill, one has the accuracy of the finest machine coupled with the skilled attendance of the workman. When one adds to this mechanical complex an external source of power, the line of division becomes evert more difficult to establish. In general, the machine emphasizes specialist)-
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n
tion of function, where... the tool indicates flexibility: „ phtninc machine performs only one operation, whereas a knife can be used to smooth wood, to carve it. to split it, or to pry open « lock or to drive in a screw. The automatic machine, then, is a very speeialiied kind of adaptation; it involves the notion of an external smm;e 0{ pgvrer, a niorL- or less complicated inter-relation of parts, and u limited kind of activity. From the beginning the machine was a sort of minor organism, designed to perform a single sK     funeliimk.
Along with these dynamic elements in technology there is another set, more static in character, but equally important in function. While the growth of machines is the most patent technical fact of the last thousand years, the machine, in the form of the fire-drill or the potter's wheel, lias been in existence since at least neolithic times. During the earlier period, some of the most effective adaptation* of the environment came, not front the invention of machines, but (mm the equally admirable invention of utensils, apparatus, and utilities. The basket and the pot stand for the first, the dye vat and the brickkiln stand for the second, and reservoirs and aqueducts and rouds and buildings belong to the third class. The modern period has finally given us the power utililv, like the railroad track or the electric transmission line, which functions only through the operation of power machinery. While tools and machines transform the environment by changing the shape and location of objects, utensils and apparatus have been used to effect equally necessary chemical transformations. Tanning, brewing, distilling, dyeing Imvc been as important in man's technical development as smithing or weaving. But most of these processes remained in their traditional state till the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is only since then that they have been influenced in any large degree by the same set ol scientific forces and human interests that were developing the modern power-machine.
In the series of objects from utensils to utilities there is ™eta™ relation between the workman and the process that on* notes hi the series between tools and automatic machines: difference in tn« degree of specialisation, the degree of impemnalhy. But since people's attention is directed most easily to the w«.er and more
vp l>p«»n ii.llinMi.cil in anv lame degree \>\ cue nam*
U TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
active pari* of the environment, the role of the utility and the apparatus has been neglected in most discussions of the machine, or, what is almost as bad, these technical instrument.'? have all been clumsily grouped as machines. The point to remember is that both have played an enormous part in the development of the modem environment; and at no stage in history can the two means of adaptation he split apart. Every technological complex includes both: not least our modern one.
When I use the word machines hereafter I shy 11 refer to specific objects like the printing press or the power loom. When I use the term "the machine" I shall employ it as a shorthand reference to the entire technological complex. This will embrace the knowledge and skills and arts derived from industry or implicated in the new technics, and will include various forms of tool, instrument, apparatus and utility as well as machine* proper.
2; The Monastery and the Clock
Where did the machine first take form in modem civilization? There was plainly more than one point of origin. Our mechanical civilization represents the convergence of numerous habits, ideas, and modes of living, as well as technical instruments; and some of these were, in the beginning, directly opposed to the civilization they helped to create. But the first manifestation of the new order took place in the general picture of the world: during the first seven centuries of the machine's existence the categories of time and space underwent an extraordinary change, and no aspect cf life was left untouched by this transformation. The application of quantitative methods of thought to the study of nature had its first manifestation in the regular measurement of time; and the new mechanical conception of lime arose in part out of the routine of the monastery. Alfred Whitehead has emphasized the importance of the scholastic belief in a universe ordered by Cod as one of the foundations of modern physics: but behind that belief was the presence of order in the institutions of the Church itself.
The technics of the ancient world were still carried on from Constantinople and Baghdad to Sicily and Cordova: hence the early
CULTURAL PREPARATION
13
\n nart *-»ilf g\\ Im* mill tt\P of the monastery.
i
lend taken by Salerno in the scientific and medical advances of the Middl-- Age. ll was, however, in the monasteries of the West that the desire for Drder anil power, other than that expressed in the military domination of weaker men. fir-l manifested il-rlf after the long (uncertainty and bloody confusion that attended the breakdown of the Roman Empire. Within the wall- of the monastery was sanctuary: under the rule "i the Order surprise and doubt and caprice and irregularity were put at bay. Oppo-cd to the erratic fluctuations and pulsation- i'l tin- worldly lib- was the iron discipline of the rule. Benedict added a seventh period to the devotions of the day, and in the seventh century, by a bull of Pope Sahinianus, it was decreed that the bell1- <->l l'"' niona-lery be rung seven times in the twenty-four hours. These punctuation marks in the day were known as ihecanoni-cil hours, and some means of keeping count of them and ensuring their regular repetition be«.nne necessary.
According i<> a no* discredited legend, the first modern mechanical clock, worked by falling weights, was invented by the monk named Gerbert who afterwards became Pope Sylvester II near the close of the tenth century. This clock was probably only a water clock, one of lho«e bequests of the ancient world either left over directly from the days of the Romans, like the water-wheel ibelf, or coming b.uk again into the West through the Arabs. But the legend, as so often happens, is accurate in its implications if not in its facts. The munastcn was the seal of a regular life, arid an instrument for striking the hours at intervals or for reminding the bell-ringer tbnt it was lime to Mi ike the bells, was an almost inevitable product of this life. If the mechanical clock did not appear until the cities of the thirteenth century demanded an orderly routine, the habit of order ttseli and the earnest regulation of time-sequences had become almost second nature in the monastery. Coulton agrees with Somlwrt in looking upon the Benedictine* the great working order, as perhaps the original founders of modem capitalism: their rule certainly took the CUTJM off work and their vigorous engineering enterprises may «ven have robbed warfare of some "f its glamor. So one is nnt strum-'"g the facts when one suggests that the monastcrie*-** one time tin-re were 40.000 under the Benedictine rule-^hclped to give huamn
second nature m Hie monastery. coui'Mii a&YxtV
H TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of svnehronizing the actions of men.
Was it by reason of the collective Christian desire to provide for the welfare of souls in eternity by regular prayers and devotions that time-keeping and the habits of temporal order took hold of men's minds: habits that capitalist civilization presently turned to good WBOUlit? One must perhaps accept the irony of this paradox. At all events, by the thirteenth century there are definite records oi mechanical clocks, and by 1370 a well-designed "modern'* clock had been built by Heinrich von Wyek at Paris. Meanwhile, bell towers had come into existence, and the new clocks, if they did not have, till the fourteenth century, a dial and a hand that translated the movement of time into a movement through space, at all events struck the hours. The clouds that could paralyze the sundial, the freezing that could stop the water clock on a winter night, wen no longer obstacles to time-keeping: summer or winter, day or night, one was aware of ihe measured clank of the dock. The instrument presently spread outside the monastery; and the regular striking of the bells brought a new regularity into the life of the workman and the merchant. The bells of the clock tower almost denned urban existence. Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.
The clock, not die steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of tlie machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous. Here, at the very beginning of modem technics, appeared prophetically the uccuraie automatic machine which, only after centuries of further effort, was also to prove the final consummation of this technics in every department of industrial activity. There had been power-machines such as the water-mill, before the clock; and there had also been various kinds of automata, to awaken the wonder of the populace in the temple, or to please ihe idle fancy of some Moslem caliph: machines one find* illustrated in Hero and Al-WL But here was a new kind of
CULTURAL PREPARATION 15 power-machine, in which the source of power and the transmission were of such a nature as to ensure the even flow of energy throughout the works and to make possible regular production and a standardized product. In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, die clock has been tin? foremost machine in modern technical and at each period it has remained in die lead: it marks a per lection toward which other machines aspire. The dock, moreover, served as a model for many other kinds of mechanical works, and the analysis of motion that accompanied the perfection of the clock, with the various types of gearing and transmission (hat were elaborated, contributed to the success of quite different kinds of machine. Smiths could have hammered thousands of suit- of armor ot thousands of iron cannon, wheelwrights could have shaped thousands of great water-wheel* or crude gears, without inventing any of the spot ij 1 types of movement developed in clockwork, and without am <>| die accuracy <it measurement and fineness of articulation that finally produced the accurate eighteenth century chronometer.
The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose "product'" is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time front human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world oi science. There is relatively little foundation for this belief in common human experience: throughout the year the days are of uneven duration, and not mereh does the relation between day and night steadily change, but a Blight journey from East to West altera astronomical time by a certain number of minutes. In terms of the hitman organism itself, mechanical time is even more foreign: while human life has regularities of its own, the beat of the pulse, the breathing of lite lungs, these change from hour to hour with mood and aclion, and in the longer span of days, lime is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. The shepherd measures from the lime the ewes Jamhed; the farmer measures back to ihe day of sowing or forward to the harvest: if growth has it* own duration and regularities, behind it arc not simply matter and motion
16 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
Ihii the facts of development: in short, history. And while mechanical lime is strung QUI in a succession of mathematically isolated mutants, organic time—whal Rergson culls duration—is cumulative in Us effects. Though mechanical time can, in a sense, be speeded up or run backward, like the hands of a clock or the images of a moving picture, organic time moves in only one direction—through the cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, .mil death—and tlx-pun that is already dead remain- present in the future that has still to he born.
Around 1345. according to Thorndiko, the division oi hours into sixty minutes and of Minutes into »ixt) seconds became common: it was this abstract framewoik of divided lime that became limn* and more the point of reference for both action and thought, and in the effort lo arrive at accurac\ in this dcp.iMiiuiii. the astronomical exploration of the sky focu--c.I ..million further 11*.■ 11 the regular, implacable movements of the lifav. ui\ bodies through space. Early in the sixteenth century a young Nuremberg mechanic. l'e|er Henletn. 18 supposed to have cieated "many-wheeled u.idho out ol small hits of iron" and hy the end of the century the small domestic clock had been introduced in England and Holland. A* with tin- motor car and the airplane, the richer classes hi -I took over the new mcchauism and popularized it: partly because they alone could afford it, partly because ibe new bourgeois;,- were the first to discover that, as Franklin later put it. "lime la money." To become "as regului as clockwork" was the bourgeoi- ideal, and 10 own a watch was for long a definite symbol of MiCCCSS. Tlic irt■ reusing tempo of civilization led to a demand for greater power; and in turn power quickened the tempo.
Now, the orderly punctual life that fii-t look shape in the monasteries is not native to mankind, although by now Western peoples are so thoroughly regimented by the clock that it IS "second nalure" and they look upon its observance as a fact of nature. Many Eautern civilisations have flourished on a loose basis in time; the Hindus have in fact been no indifferent lo time that they lack even an authentic chronology of the years. Only yesterday, in the midst of the industrialization* of Soviet Russia, did n society come inlo exisl-
17
I ILTIHAL PREPARATION enee to further the carrying of watches there and to propaganda
the 1......'fits of punctuality. The popularisation of time-keeping, which
followed the |.....lu.iion of the cheap standardized watch, first in
Geneva, then in America around the middle of the last century, was essential to a well-articulated system of transportation and production.
To keep time was once a peculiar attribute of music: it guve indus-trial value lo the workshop song or the tattoo or the chantry of the sailors tugging .'i a rope. But the effect of die mechanical clock is more pen isive and strict: il presides over the day from the hour of rising to the hour of rest. When one thinks ol the day as an abstract
span of time, one d.....- not go to bed with the chickens on a winter's
night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslight-, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When tine thinks of time, not a- a scipiener of experiences, but a*, a collection of hours, minute-, and onds, llie habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took mi the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, il could even be rxpanded by die invention of labor-saving instruments.
Abstrai t time became the new medium of existence. Otganic functions themselves were regulated by il: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted hy the clock: one slept, not when ooa was tired, but. when the clock sanctioned il. A generalized time-cortseiun-iicss -,, (,-ompunied the wider use of clocks: dissociating lime from organic sequences, it became easier for the men of ihe Renascence lo indulge the fantasy of reviving the classic past or of reliving the splendors of antique Roman civilisation: the <mll id history, appearing first in daily rilual, finally abstracted itself as a special discipline. In the seventeenth century journalism and periodic literature made their appearance: even in dress, following the lead of Venice as fashion-cenler, people altered style* ewary year ratlier than every generation.
The gain in mechanical efficiency through co-ordination nad through ihe closer articulation of the day's events cannot be overestimated: while ibis increase cannot be measured in mere htfrtft power, one has only to imagine il* absence today to fere**« d* "peedy disruption and eventual collapse of our entire socJatf- T»
...» »- .i. + ii
m  m mechaniea
I8 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
modern industrial regime could do without coal and iron and steam
easier than it could do without the clock.
3: Space, Distance, Movement
"A child and an adult, an Australian primitive and n European, a man of the Middle Ages and a contemporary, are distinguished not only hy a difference in degree, but by a difference in kind liy their methods of pictorial representation."
Dagobert Frey, whose words I haw ju~i .[noted, ha* made a penetrating study of the difference in spatial conception* between the early Middle Ages and the Renascence: he has re-enforced by a wealth of specific detail, the generalization that no tWO cultures live conceptually in the same kind of time and space. Space and lime, like language itself, are works of art, tind like language they help condition and direct practical action. Long before Kant announced lhat time and space were categories of the mind, long before the mathematicians discovered that there were conceivable and rational form* of space other than the form described by Euclid, mankind at large had acted on this premise. Like the Englishman in France who thought that bread was the right name for le pain each culture believes that every other kind of space and time is an approximation to or a per-version of the real space and time in which it lives.
During the Middle Ages spatial relations tended to be organized as symbols and values. The highest ohject in the city was the church spire which pointed toward heaven and dominated all the lesser buildings, as the church dominated their hopes and fears. Space was divided arbitrarily to represent the seven virtues or the twelve apostles or the ten commandments or the trinity. Without constant symbolic reference lo the fables and myths of Christianity the rationale of medieval space would collapse. Even the most rational minds were not exempt: Roger Bacon was a careful student of optics, but after lie had described the seven coverings of the eye he added that by such means God had willed to express in our bodies an image of the seven gifts of the spirit.
Size signified importance; to represent human beings of entirely different sizes on the same plane of vision and at the same distance
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from the observer was entirely possible for the medieval artist. This same habit applies not only to the representation of real objects but to the organization of terrestrial experience by means of the map. In medieval cartography the water and the land masses of the earth, even when approximately known, may be represented in an arbitrary hgui.' like a tree, with no regard for the actual relations as experienced by a traveller, and with no interest in anything except the allegorical correspondence.
One fuitlier characteri--iic <>f medieval spare nn^t be noted: space and t. i nit form two relatively independent systems. First: the medieval r11-t introduced other time* within his own spatial world, as when he projei ted the events of Christ's life within a contemporary Italian i-itv. without the slightest feeling that the passage of lime has made a dill reiice, just a> in Chancer the classical legend of Tmilus and Cresaida la related as if it were a contemporary story, When a medieval < hronicler mention- the King, as the author of The Wander-ing Scholars remarks, it is sometimes a little difficult to find out whelhei he is talking about Caesar or Alexander the Great or his own monan h: each is equally near to him. Indeed, the word anachronism is meaning! eis when applied to medieval art: it is only when one related events to a co-ordinated frame of time and space that ln'ing out of time or being untrue to lime became disconcerling. r Similarly, in Boiiicelli's The Three Miracles of St. Zenobius, three different tunc* an presented upon a single siagc.
Běi AUK of this separation of lime and space, things could appear and disappear suddenly, unaccountably: the dropping of a íhípbeluw the horizon no more needed an explanation than the dropping oi a demon down the chimney, There was no mystery about the past from which ihej had emerged, no speculation as to the future toward which they were bound: objects swam into vision and sank out of it willi something of ihe same mystery in which the coming and going of adults iff nets the experience of young children, whose first graphic efforts so much resemble in llieir organization the world oi the medieval artist. In this symbolic world of space and tunc everything was either a mystery or a miracle. The connecting link between
TECHNICS AND UVUUATION events was the cosmic and religious order: tin- true order of nliia, wast Heaven, even as the true order of time was Eternity.
Between the fourteenth mid the seventeenth century a revolt tionary change in the conception of space took place in W«iom Europe. Space as a hierarchy of values wan replaced by space a* q system of magnitudes. One of the indications of tins new orientation was the closer study of the relations of objects in space and the discovery of the laws of perspective and the systematic organization of pictures within the new frame fixed by the foreground, tin-horizon and the vanishing point. Perspective tinned the symbolic relation of objects into a visual relation: the visual in turn became a quantitative relation. In the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine Importance, "out distance. Bodies did not exist separately as absolute magnitudes: they were co-ordinated with Other bodies within the same Frame of vision and must be in scale, To achieve this scale, there must be an accurate representation of the object itself, a point for point correspondence between the picture arid the image: hence a fresh interest in external nature and in questions of fart. The division of the canvas into squares and the accurate observation of the world through this abstract checkerboard marked the new technique of the painter, from Paolo Ucello onward.
The new in tares) in perspective brought depth into the picture and distance into the mind. In the older pictures, one's eye jumped from one part to another, picking up symbolic crumbs as laste and fancy dictated: in the new pictures, one's eye followed the lines of linear perspective alurig streets, buildings, tessellated pavements whose parallel lines the painter purposely introduced in order to make the eye itself travel. Even the objects in the foreground were sometimes grotesquely placed and foreshortened in order 1o create the-same illusion. Movement became it new source of value: m< ment for its own sake. The measured space of the picture re-enfori die measured time of the clock.
Within this new ideal network of space and time all events n> took place; and the most satisfactory event within this system was uniform motion in a straight  line, for sin h motion Ifnt itself lq accurate representation within die system of spatial and tempo)
CULTURAL ľItEľAHATiON
21
co-ordinates. One further consequence of this spatial tinier moil be noted: to pbne a thing and to lime it became essential to one's understanding of it. In Retias.ce.nee space, the existence of íihject* must be accounted for: their passage through time and space i* a clue to their appearance at any particular moment in any parlirsular place. The unknown is therefore no less determinate dun die known* given the roundness of the globe, the position of the Indies ctmld lie assumed and the time-distance calculated. The very existence of such an order was an incentive to explore it and to fill up the parts that were unknown.
What the painters demonstrated in their application of perspective, the cartographers established in the same century in their new maps. The Hereford Map of 1314 might have been ibme by a child: it was practically worthless for navigation. That of L'eclto's coo, temporary, Andrea Banco, 1436, was conceived on rational line:., and represented a gain in conception as well a.- in practical accuracy. By laying down the invisible lines of hiiilnde and longitude, the cartographers paved the way for later explorers, like Columbus: a* with the later scientific method, the abstract system gave rational expectation^ even if on the basis of inaccurate knowledge. No longer was it necessary for the navigator to hug the shore line: lie could launch out into the unknown, sei his course toward an arbitrary point, and return approximately to Uie pkjce of departure. Both Eden and Heaven were outside the new sjliue: and though they lingered on as tlie ostensible subjects ni painting, the real subject* were Time and Space and Nature and Man.
Presently, mi the basis laid down by the painter and the cartographer, an interest in space as such, in movement as *ucli, in iow-motion n- such, arose. In back nf this interest were of atom man concrete alterations: roads had become mori; secure, vessels »etn being built more soundly, above all. new inventions—the magnetic needle, die astrolabe, the rudder—had made it possible to chart and to hob! a more accurate course at sea. The gold of the Indies and die fabled fountains of ynnUi and (he happy isles of cmll«a senauaJ delight doubtless beckoned too: but the presence of lllWS Wngu*
__f .1__I__u
TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION goals does not lessen the importance of the new schemata. The categories of time and space, once practically dissociated, had herome uniled: and the attractions of measured time and measured space undermined the earlier conceptions of infinity and eternity, since measurement must begin with an arbitrary here and now even if space and time he empty. The itch to use space and time had broken out: and once they were co-ordinated with movement, they could be contracted or expanded: the conquest of space and time had begun. (It is interesting, however, to note that the yetj concept of acceleration, which is part of our daily mechanical experience, was not formulated till the seventeenth century.)
The signs of this conquest are many: they came forth in rapid succession. In military arts the cross-bow and the ballista were re-vived and extended, and on their heels came more powerful weapons for annihilating; distance—the cannon and later the musket. Leonardo conceived an airplane and built one. Fantastic project! for flight were canvassed. In 1120 Fontána described a velocipede: in 1589 Cilles de Bom of Antwerp apparently built a man-propelled wagon: ic.-tless preludes to the vast efforts and initiative- of the nineteenth century. As with so many element-, in our culture, the original impulse was imparted to this movement by the Arab-: as cans .1- Will Aim I-(,tá-im had attempted Sight, and in 1065 Oliver of Malmesbury had killed himself in an attempt to -n.ir from a bigfa place: but from the fifteenth century on the desire to conquei tin au became a recurrent preoccupation of inventive mind : and it was close enough to popular thought to make the report uf 1 flight from Portugal to Vienna serve as a news hoax in L709.
Tile new ftttitude toward tune and space infected the workshop and the counting hou-e, the at my and tin- < itv. The tempo became faster: the magnitudes became grcatei: conceptually, modern culture Ianinli.il itself into -pare ami gi\e it-elf over to movement. What
Max Weber called (he "romanticism of numbers" grew naturally nut of this intensi. In timt •k'-epmg. in hading, in lighting men counted numbers; and finally, as the habit grew, only numbers counted.
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1: The Influence of Capitalism
The romanticism of numbers bad still another aspect, important for the development of scientific habits of thought. Tin- was the riss of capitalism, and the change from ■ baiter economy, facilitated by small supplier of variable local coinage, to a money economy with an Internationa] credit structure and a constant reference to the abstract symbols of wealth: gold, drafts, bills of exchange, eventually merely numbers.
From the standpoint of technique, ibis structure had its origin in the towns of Northern Italy, particularly Florence and Venice, in the fourteenth century; two hundred years later there was its existence in Antwerp an international bourse, devoted to aiding speculation in shipments from foreign port- and in money itself. Llv the middle of the sixteenth century book-keeping by duuhle entry. bilU of ex-change, letters of credit, and speculation in "futures" were all developed in essentially their modem form. 'Whereas ihe procedures of science were not refined and codified until after Galileo and Newton, finance had emerged in its present-day dress at the very beginning of the machine age: Jacob Fugger and J. Pierponl Morgan could understand each other's methods and point of view and temperaroeut far better than Paracelsus and Einstein.
The development of capitalism brought the new habit* of abstraction and calculation into the lives of city people: only the country folk, still existing on their more primitive local basis, wttra partly immune. Capitalism turned people from tangibles to intangibles: its symbol, as Sombart observes, is the account book: "its life-value lies in its profit and loss account." The "economy of acquisition," which bad hitherto been practiced by rare and fabulous creatures like Midas and Croesus, became once more the everyday mode: it tended to replace the direct "economy of needs" and to substitute money-values for life-values. The whole process of business took on more end more an abstract form; it was concerned with non-commodities, imaginary futures, hypothetical gains.
Kail Mont well summed up Urn new process of IransnraUtiont-"Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into ft.
I
ilim'i "eeoriomv ol needs  ami 10 suuMuirie woui r
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TECHNICS AND C t V I L I / \ t i O N
everything, whether a commodity or nut, is convertible into gold. Even Hung becomes saleable and purchasable. Circulation is i|)e great social retort into which everything is thrown and out of which everything is recovered as crystallized money. Not even the bones of the saints are able to withstand this alchemy; and still less able to withstand it are more delicate things, sacrosanct things which are outside the commercial traffic of men. Just as all qualitative differences between commodities are effaced in money, so money, a radical leveller, effaces all distinctions. Hut money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of an individual. Thus social power becomes private power in the hands of a private person."
This last fact was particularly important for life and thought: the quest of power by means of abstractions. One abstraction re-enforced the other. Time was money: money was power: power required the furtherance of trade and production: production was diverted from the channels of din-el use into tho^e of remote trade, toward the acquisition of larger profits, with a larger margin for new capital expenditures for wars, foreign conquests, mines, productive enterprises . . . more money and more power. Of all forms of wealth, money alone is without assignable limits. The prince who might desire to build five palaces would hesitate to build five thousand: but what was to prevent him from seeking by conquest and taxes to multiply by thousands the riches in his treasury? Under a money economy, to speed up the process of production was to speed up the turnover: more money. And as the emphasis upon money grew in part out of the increasing mobility of late medieval society, with its international trade, so did the resulting money economy promote more trade: landed wealth, humanized wealth, houses, paintings, sculptures, books, even gold itself were all relatively difficult to transport. whereas money could be transported after pronouncing the proper abr.-oaJ.ibra by a simple algebraic operation on one side or another of the ledger.
In time, men were more at home with abstractions than they were with die goods they represented. The typical operations of finance were the acquisition or the exchange of magnitudes. "Even the day*
tivetv dJllicult to transport, whereas monev could be transoorteii alter
CULTURAL HMEPARATION 25 dwami of the pecuniary day-dreamer." as Veblcn observed, "lake shape as a calculus of profit and loss computed in standard unit* of an impersonal magnitude.*' Men became powerful to the extent tliat liny neglected the real world of wheal and wool, food and cloilies, and centered their attention on the purely quantitative rep-1« -malíon of it in tokens and symbols: to think in term* of mere weight and number, to make quantity not alone an indication of value ttut tlx- criterion of value—that was ihe contribution of capitalism to        mechanical world-picture. So the abstractions of capitalism preceded the abstractions of modern science and re-eufoiced at every point i!- typical lessons and its typical methods of pioceduie. The
clarification and the convenience, particularly for long distancc trading in -pace .111.I tune were great: but the social price of these economies was a high one. Mark Kepler's words, published in 1S95: "A-, the car i- made to perceive sound and the 01: to perceive color, so the mind of man has been formed to understand, not all sorts of things, but quantities, It perceives any given thing more clearly in proportion as lhal. thing is close to bare quantities as to its origins, but the further a thing recedes from quantities, lite more darkness and error inheres in it."
Was it an accident that the founders and patrons of the Royal Societ) in London—indeed some of the first experimenters in ihe physical sciences—were merchants from the City? King Charles 11 might laugh uncontrollably when he heard that these gentlemen had spent their time weighing air; but their instincts were justified, their procedure was correct: the method itself belonged to their tradition, and there was money in it. The power that was science and the power that was money were, in final analysis, the same kind of power: the power of abstraction, measurement, quantification.
But it was not merely in the promotion of abstract habits of thought and pragmatic interests and quantitative estimations that capitalism prepared the way for modem technics. From the beginning machines and factory production, like big guns and armaments, mad© direct demands for capital far above the small advances nece«ary tP provide the old-style handicraft worker with tools or keep him nfive. The freedom to operate independent workshops and factorie*. to 11«
o6 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
machines and profit by them, went to those who had command of capital. While the feudal families, with llioir command over the- laud, often had a monopoly over sucli natural resources as were found in the earth, and often retained an interest in glass-making, coal-mining, and iron-works right down to modern tinn-s. the new mechanical inventions lent themselves to exploitation by the merchant clashes. Tile incentive to mechanisation lay in the greater profits that could he extracted through the multiplied power and efficiency of the machine.
Thus, although eapilali-iu and technics must be clearly distinguished at even stage, one conditioned the oilier and reacted upon it. Tlic merchant accumulated capital bj widening the Bcale of his operations, quickening his turnover, and discovering new territorial fur exploitation: the inventor carried on a parallel process by exploiting new methods of production and devising new ihings to be produced. Sometimes trade appeared as a rival to ihe machine by offering greater opportunities foi profit: sometimes ii curbed further development! in order to increase the profit of a particular monopoly} both motives aie still operative in capitalist society. From the first, there were disparities and conflicts between these two forms of exploitation: but Irade was the older partner and exercised a higher authority. It was trade that gathered up new materials from the fadies and iinm iL-• Amen-a-, new foods, new cereals, tobacco, Inrs: it was Hade that found a new market for the trash that was turned out by eighteenth century ntase-production: it was trade— abetted by war—thai developed the large-scale enterprises and the
4<liniiii-ii,itive capacity and method that made it possible to create the industrial system as a whole and weld together its various parts.
Whether tnaehine- would have been invented so rapidly and poshed M zealously without the extra incentive of commercial profit is extremely doubtful: for all the mure skilled hatidicra It occupations
were deeply entrenched, and the introduction of printing, for example, was delayed as much as twenty years in Paris by the bitter oppo-ilion of the guild of snibe-: and copvi-ts. But while technics Undoubtedly owes an lioiie-t debt to capitalism, as it docs likewise to war, it was nevertheless unfortunule ihut the machine was coudi-
CULTURAL PREPARATION 27
tinned, at the oulset, by these foreign institutions and took on characteristic > that had nothing essentially to do with die USchnjCftl processes or the forms of work. Capitalism utilized the machine, not to further social welfare, but to inat-ase private profit; mechanical instruments were used for the .lppr.mdizement of the ruling classes. It was because of capitalism that the handicraft industries in both Europe and other paris of the world were rerklcs'sly destroyed by
machine products, even when the latter were inferior to the thing they replaced! for the prcsii/jc of improvement ami success and power was with th<' machine, cvm when it improved nothing, even when technically speaking it was a failure. It was because of the possibilities of profit that the place of the machine was avwempfaaSCTcd and the degree of regimental ion pushed beyond what was necessary to harmony or efficiency. It was because of certain traits in private capitalism that the machine—which was a neutral agent—has often seemed, and in fact has sometimes been, a malicious element in society, careless of human life, indifferent to human iulere-ts. The machine has suffered for the sin- of capitalism; contrariwise, capitalism has often taken credit for the virtues of the machine.
By Supporting the machine. Capitalism quickened its puce, and gave a special incentive to preoccupation with mechanical improvements; though it often failed to reward the inventor, it succeeded by blandishments and promises in stimulating him to further effort. In many departments the pace was over-accelerated, and ihe stimulus was over-applied: indeed, the necessity to promote continual changes and improvements, which has been characteristic of capitalism, introduced an clement of instability into technics and kept society from Bssimilaiiug ils mechanical improvements and integrating them in ait appropriate social pattern. As capitalism itself ha- developed and expanded, these vices have in fact grown more enormous, and the dangers to society as a whole have likewise grown proportionately, Enough here to notice the close historical association of modem technics and modern capitalism, ami to point out that, for all this historical development, there is no necessary connection between them. Capitalism ha* existed in other civilizations, which liad Si relatively low technical development; and technics made steady im-
i-i til i     i, uuiiMiiul. mi an me more -Miieu jiaim'iCTli'il OLCuuaiious
r
28
Tti:n
nh:s and civilization
ntemnealM bom the tenth to the fifteenth century without the sped*) Incentive <rf e,i„i:,ti,m. But the styl« °* *■ rna,1,m'' lia< llP t0 present heen powerfully influenced hv capitalism: the emphasis upon |,igne<s. for example, is a commercial trait; it appeared in guild halls mi merchants' hoii-es long before it was evident in technics, with its originally Btodwl scale of operations.
5; From Fable to Fact
Meanwhile, with the transformation of the concepts of time and space went a change in the direction of interest from the heavenly world to the natural one. Around the twelfth century the supernatural •world, in which the European mind had heen enveloped as in a cloud fro in the decay of the classic schools of thought onward, began to lift: the beautiful culture of Provence whose language Dante himself had thought perhaps lo u-e for his Divine Comedy, was the first bud of the new order: a bud destined to be savagely blighted by llie Alhigciisian crusade.
Everv culture lives within its dream. That of Christianity was one in i\ln> li a fabulous heavenly world, filled with gods, saints, devils, demons, angel-, archangel-, cherubim and seraphim and dominions and powers, shot it- fantastically magnified shapes and images across the iirtu.il life ol e.irthborn man. This dream pervades the life of a culture us the fantasies jjf night dominate the mind of a "deeper: it i* reality—while the -].-. j. lasts. But. like the sbeper, a culture lives within an objective world that goe= on through its sleeping or waking, and sometimes breaks into the dream, like a noise, \o nudity it or to make further deep impossible.
By a slow natural proms, the world of nature broke in upon the medieval dream of hell and paradise and eternity: in the fresh naturalistic sculpture of the thirteenth century .lrnr.be, one can wahh the first uneasy stir of the sleeper,, as the light of morning -irikes Ins eyes. At first, tin- craftsman's interest in nature was a confused one: side by side with the fine carvings of oak leaves and hawthorn sprays, faithfully copied, tenderly arranged, the sculptor still - rented strange monsters, gargoyles, chimeras, legendary beasts. But the interest in nature steadily broadened and became more con-
M i i l II u. F'REPA RATION
29
Burning. The no'fve feeling of the thirteenth century .mist turned urto the systematic exploration of the sixteenth century botanists ind
physiologies.
•In the Mi.Idle Ages," as Emile Male snid, '-the idea of a thing which a in.in lormed for himsrlf was always mure mil than the acvuul tiring it-elf, and we see why these mystical ecnlurie, had no conception of what men now call science. The study of thing* for'their own -.ikr held no meaning for the thoughtful nun. , . . The tusk i.ji the siu.l.-nt of nature w.is to discern the eternal truth that God
WOttld have each thing express." In escaping this attitude, the vulgar had an advantage over tl.c learned: thrir minds were less capable of forging their own shackles, A rational common reuse interest in Nature was not ,i product of the new classical learning of the Reus* centre; lather, one iiiix —I say. that a few centuries after it had lloiir-i-lie.l among the p> ..-.nil- and the masons, it made its w.iy l.v another route intn the court and the study and the university, V ill,ml ile Honnecourl'a notebook, the precious Lcpie-i «i ;i pre,u maMer-masou. has drawings of a bear, .i wun, J |ir.isdiopper, a By, a dragoi'ilb. -i lobster, a lion arid a pair of p.irroquets, -ill done directly from life. The book of Yihi re reappeared, as in a palimpsest, through tile heav-enl> book ol" the Word.
During the Middle Ages the < sternal world had had no conceptual hold upon the inuul. N.ituuil facts were insignificant compared ivith
the diviro.....ler and intention which Christ and his Church had
revealed: lb. \ bible world was merely a pledge and a symbol ul that I■'terti.il W'.nl.l of whose blisse- ami damnations it gave such « keen foretaste. People ate and drank and mated, basked in the sun and grew solemn under the stars; but there was little meaning in th« immediate state: whatever significance the items of daily life hud
. „. -i .....r-wu iec and costumes and rehearsals for the drama
ot Man's pilgrimage through eternity. How far could Un? mind go in scientific mensuration and observation as long as the mystic mim-1" I s three and four and seven and nine and twelve filled every relation with an allegorical significance, Before the sequences in nature could be studied, it was necessary to discipline the imagination and sharpen the \ tsioni mystic second sight must be converted into factual
TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
30
hrst sight. The artists had a fuller part in this discipline titan they have usually been credited with. In enumerating the many parts of nature that cannot be studied without liie "aid and intervening of mathematics," Francis Bacon properly includes perspective, music, architecture, and engineering along with the sciences of astronomy and cosmography.
The change in attitude toward nature manifested it^r'lf in solitary figures long before it became common. Roger Baron's e\perimental precepts and his special researches in optica have long been commonplace knowledge; indeed, like the scientific vision of his Elizabethan namesake they have been somewhat overrated: their significance lies in the fact that they represented a general trend. In the thirteenth Century, the pupils of Albertus Magnus were led by a new curiosity to explore their environment, while Absalon of St. Victor complained that the students wished to study "the conformation of the globe, the nature of the elements, the place of the stars, the nature of animals, the viulence of the wind, the life of herbs and roots." Dante and Petrarch, unlike most medieval men, no longer avoided mountains as mere terrifying obstacles that increased the hardships of travel: they sought them and climbed them, for the exaltation that comes from the conquest of distance and the attainment of a bird's-eye view. Later, Leonardo explored the hills of Tuscany, discovered fossils, made correct interpretations of the processes of geology: Agricola, urged on by his interest in mining, did the same. The herbals and treatises on natural history that came out during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though they still mingled fable and conjecture with fact, were resolute steps towurd the delineation of nature: their admirable pictures still witness this. And the little books on the seasons and the routine of daily life moved in the same direction. The great painters were not far behind. The Sistine Chapel, no less than Rembrandt's famous picture, was an anatomy lesson, and Leonardo was a worthy predecessor to Vesalius, whose life overlapped bis. In the sixteenth century, according In Beekmaim, there were numerous private natural history collections, and in J659 Eliaa Ashmole purchased the Tradescant collection, which he later presented to Oxford.
cultural preparation 41
The discovery of nature as a whole was the most important part of that era of discovery which began for the Western World with the Crusades and the travels of Marco Polo and the southward ventures of the Portuguese. Nature existed to he explored, to be invaded, to be conquered, and finally, to be understood. Dissolving, the medieval dream disclosed the world of nature, as a lifting min opens to view the rocks and trees and herds on a hillside, whose existence had been heralded only by the occasional tinkling of bells or the lowing of a cow. Unfortunately, the medieval habit of separating the soul of man from the life of the material world persisted, though the theology that supported it was weakened; for as soon as the procedure of exploration was definitely outlined in the philosophy and mechanics of the seventeenth century man himself was excluded from the picture. Technics perhaps temporarily profited by this exclusion; but in the long run die result was to prove unfortunate. In attempting to seize power man tended to reduce himself to an abstraction, or, what comes to almost the same thing, to eliminate every part of himself except that which was bent on seizing power.
6: The Obstacle of Animism
The great series of technical improvements that began to cryttal-lize around the sixteenth century rested on a dissociation of the animate and the mechanical. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in the way of this dissociation was the persistence of inveterate hahiUOj animistic thinking. Despite animism, such dissociations had indeed been made in the past: one of the greatest of such acts was the invention of the wheel. Even in the relatively advanced cmlisaUoil of die Assyrians one sees representations of great statues being mow* across bare ground on a sledge. Doubtless the notion of the wfceel came originally from observing that rolling a log waa ***** «*« shoving it: but trees existed for untold years and the trees had gone on for many thouanndB, in all likeiAood, neolithic inventor performed the stunning ad of distoouHwm made possible the cart i**toA
So long as every object, animate or *"J^t as the dwelling place of a spirit, so long aa one wpeetad a.iw
Uireruon. ine gfeat palmers weie tun mi ocm
I
TECHNICS AND aVIMZATION
ship to behave like a living creature, if was msi in impossible io j-olate as a mechanical sequence the special function one nought to serve. Just .-is the Egyptian workman, when he made the leg „r fl chair, fashioned it to represent the leg ol a hulloek, so the desire naively 1» reproduce the organic, and to conjure up giants and djiim„ for power, instead of contriving their abstract equivalent, retarded the development of the machine. Nature often assists in such ahstrat> lion: the swan's use of it- wing may have suggested the sail, evefe as the hornet's nest suggested paper. Conversely, the body itself fi a sort of microcosm of the machine: the arms are levers, the lungs arc bellows, the eyes are lenses, the heart i- a pump, the fist is a hammer, Sue nerves are a telegraph system connected v\ith a central -idtion: hut on the whole, the mechanical instruments were invented before the physiological functions were accurately described, ihe moat ineffective kind of machine is the realistic mechanical imitation of a man or another animal: technics remembers Vsiucanson for his loom, rather tli.01 foi hi- lite-like meihanii.il dick, which not merely ate food hut went through the routine oi digestion and excretion.
Tlu-. original advances in modern teclwics became possible only when a mechanical -y-tem cmild be isolated fiotn the entire tissue of relations. Not merely did the fir-t airplane, like that of Leonardo, attempt lo reproduce the motion of birds' wings: as late as 1897 Ader's hatlikc airplane, win, h now hangs in the Conservatoire des Ail- el Metiers in V.trh had its ribs fashioned like a hat's body, and ihe very propellers, as if to exhaust all the zoological po-si-hilities, were made of thin, split wood, as much as possible like- birds' feathers, .Similarly, ihe belief that reciprocating motion, as in the movement of the arms and legs. u,i- the ''natural" form of motion was used to justify opposition lo ihe original conception of the turbine. Branca'* plan of a steam-engine, at the beginning of ihe seventeenth century showed the boiler in the form of the head and torso of a mam Circular motion, one of the molt useful and frequent attributes of a fully developed machine is, curiously, one of the least observable motions in nature: even the stars do not describe a circular course, and except for ihe rotifers, man himself, in occasional dunces end handsprings, is die chief exponent of rotary motion.
33
C I! L T t; H A L PKCPA RATION The specific triumph of the technical imagination retted on the ability to dissociate lifting power [ruin the arm ami create a crane: to dissociate work from the arlinn oi inen and animids and creule the water-mill: to dissociate light from ihe ciimliiisiion of wood ami nil and create die electric lamp. Em thousands of ye*js animi-m bad Stood in the way of this development; fat it had concealed the entire face id nature behind a scrawl ol human forms: even the star* v.-ie grouped together in the living figures of Cuter and Pollux or tin- Bull on the faintest points of resemblance. Life, not content with iis own province, hail flowed incontinently into -tone-, rivers, start, and all the natural ■ laments: the external environinimt, beaiu*e ii wais so iininedi.il'lv pait of man, remained c.ipriiimif., mischievuus. a reflection of hi- own disordered urges and fears.
Since :li- w..r!d seemed, in essence, animistic and since these "external" powers threatened man, the only method of escape that his own Will-to-power could follow was either the discipline ol ihe sell or the lompie-t oi oilier men: the way of religion or the way of war. 1 shall discuss, m another place, the spo ml contribution mat the technique and animus of warfare made lo the development of the machine; as for the discipline of the personality it wos e»sen. tially. during the Middle Ages, the province of the Church, and it had gone farthest, of course, not among the peawinu uml imbles, still clinging i" essentially pagan ways of thought, with which the Church had ■ ipediently compromised: it had gone faruW in the nwna-lci ie.i and the universities.
il,,,. anino-m was extruded by a sense of the omnipotent, of a .ingle spun, n hned, by the very enlargeme.n of Hn dut.«. out ot a,,v semblance of merely human or animal capacities. Cod had created an orderly world, and his Law prevailed '"^"T^ perhaps inscrutable; but they were not capricious the whole burden of the religion, life was to create an aUitude o humility toward the ways of God and the world he had created. II ^/^J* *»* of the Middle Ace remained superstition* *f «<« *"" *T physical doctrines of the Schoolmen were in fact anU-an-m.** M» girt of the matter was that God's world waa no. mans, «* U£ only the church could form a bridge between man and to***.
3i TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
The meaning of this division <liJ not fully become apparent until the Schoolmen them.-elves had fallen into dtttepute and their in. heritors, like Descartes, had begun to take advantage of the old breach by describing on a purely mechanical basis the entire wurld of nature—leaving out only the Church's special province, the soul of man. It was by reason of the Church's belief in an orderly independent world, as Whitehead has shown in Science and the Modern World, that the work of science could go on so confidently. The humanists of the sixteenth century might frequently be sceptics and atheists, scandalously mocking the Church even when they remained within its fold: il is perhaps no accident that the serious scientists of the seventeenth century, like Galileo. Descartes, 1 eibniz, Newton, Pascal, weie so uniformly devout men. The next step in development, partly made by Descartes himself, was. the transfer of order from God to the Machine. For God became in the eighteenth century the Eternal Clorkinaker who, having conceived and created ttnd wound up the clock of the universe, had no further responsibility until the machine ultimately broke up—or, as the nineteenth century thought, until the woiks ran down.
The method of science and technology, in their developed forms, implies a sterilization of the self, an elimination, as far as possible, of the human bias and preference, including the human pleasure in man's own image and the instinctive belief in the immediate presentations of his fantasies. What better preparation could a whole culture have for such an effort than the spread ol the monastic system and the multiplication of a host of separate communities, dedicated to the living of a humble ami self-abnegating life, under a strict rule? Here, in the monastery, was a relatively non-animistic, non-organic WOrkl: the temptations of the body were minimized in theory and, despite strain and irregularity, often minimized in practice—more often, at all events, than in secular life. The effort to exalt the individual self was suspended in the collective routine,
Like lite machine, the monastery was incapable of self -pei petualion except by renewal from without. And apart from the fact that women wen- Similarly organised in nunneries, the monastery was like the army, a strictly masculine world. Like the army, again, it sharpened
ft
0 8UC-
CULTURAL PREPARATION
and disciplined and focussed the masculine will-to-power: „ „„■. cession of military leader-; came from die religious orders, while the leader of the older that exemplified the ideals of the Counter-Reformation began Ins Hie as a soldier. One of the fir*! experimental scientists Rog«r Bacon, was a monk; so, again, wa, Mirlwel Si if el, who in 1541 widened the use of symbols in algebraic equations; the monk- -tood high in the roll of mechanics arid inventors, The -pirilual routine of the monastery, if it did not positively favor the machine, at least nullified many of the influence that worked against it. And unlike the similai discipline of the Buddhists, thai of tin- Western monks gave r isfl to more fertile and complex kinds of machinery dian prayer wheels.
In still another way did the institutions of the Church perhaps prepare the way for the machine: in their contempt for the body. Now respect for the body and its organa h deep in .ill the classic cultures of the past. Sometimes, in being imaginatively projected, the body maj be displaced symbolically by ihe parti or organ- of another animal, as in the Egyptian Horns: but the substitution is made for i!» -ake of intensifying some organic quality, the power of muscle, eye genitals. The phalhises that were carried in a religious procession were greater and more powerful, by representation, than the actual human organ-: so, too, the images of the Bods might attain heroic si;.e. to accentuate theii vitality. The whale ritual of life in the old cultures tended to empWwe respect for the body and to dwell on its b'-aiities and delights: even the monks who painted the Aianta . ases of India were under its spell. The enthronement of the human form in sculpture, and the care of the body m the nalest,a of the Greeks or the hath, of the Romans, re-mlnrcrd
this inner feeling for the organic.  The legend afeoet ?m^m
typifies the honor and the resentment that classic peoples felt against the mutd ttion of the body: one made beds to fit human bemgs one did not . bop Of! leg* or heads to fit beds, , This tffirmative sense ol the body surely never d.sappeared,««
during........veresl uiurnph. of On .suanity: every new
recovers it through their physical delight m each o, her -Srn nUrl the převalen, e of gluttony as a sin during the Middle Ages W»
as susijeuited m me co
^^^^^
routine.
tliu not ebop
36
f EGU ni CS AND Cl VI ti 2 \ 710 N
,ťlim-s to the importance of *■ l,ellv- "'" thr sy*i«maiic teaching „I' the Church wen- directed against the bod) and it* culture: ,i ,m one hand it was I Temple of the Holy Ghost, it was oUn vd-rinfuJ by nature: the flesh tended to corruption, and to achieve the pious ends of life one must mortify it and subdue it, lessening iis appetites by fasting wd abstention. Such w.-i- the lettei .,1 tlle Church':, teaching; tad while one c&Bnol suppose that the mas? „{ humanity kept close to the letter, tin- feeling against the body's exposure, it- uses, its celebration, was there.
While public b.irli houses were common in the Middle Ages, con-trarv to lh<- complacent superstition that developed after the Renos, cence abandoned them, those who were trul) holj neglected to bathe the body! they chafed their skin in hail -bin-, they whipped them-wives, ihev turned their eyes with charitable interest upon the sure.
.nul leprous and deformed. Mating lbe body, th.....'thodos minds of
the Middle Ages were prepared to do it violence. Instead of resenting ilie machines that could counterfeit ihi, or that action of the hoilv, they could welcome them. The forms nl lie- inarlime weie. nu
an ire ugly or repulsive than the bodies of crippled and l> ittered ntetj and women, or. it they were r-piil-m- ami uelv, they \\< re that much Curtbei awj hum being a temptation to (be flesh. The writer in the IV lira berg Chronicle in l.Vl}{ might sac that ••wheeled engines performing strange tasks and shows and follies come directly from the devil"—but m -pit- of itself, the Church wait creating devil's di-ciples.
The [act is, at all emits, thai the ma.iiine came mosl slowly into igrii iiltiiie, with it- lifi'-e«uis«r\ing, liie-maintaitung functions, while it prospered lu>li|y pieei-eK in those pan, of the environment where llie body nio-t infamously treated by cusluni: namel), ill the
monastery, in the mine, cm the battlefield. 7: The Road Through Magic
Between fantasy and exact knowledge, between drama and technology, there is an intermedial- station: that of magic. It was in magic that the general conquest of the external euviiunmeiil was decisively instituted. Without llu- ordei thai the Minn I, provided
i i I It KAL P R1V\K \1 1 o N
3J
the <ampa^o would possibly have b-e.i unthinkable; but without the v,ihl, scrambled daring ol the magicians the first potiftions would not I,,,, been laken For the magicians not <mK believed In rnarvelsbtrt
audaciously WUght to work them: b) thru -iiaining niter the excep. tional. lb- natural philosopher- who followed them were first givrm ) due to the regular.
The dream ol couqu-i mg mime is one of the old,-t il,.,t has flowed and I hbed ill man'- nnnd. i aeh p.-at . [inch in human history in svlij.li tin- w ill hi - tourid a     - it i v t- outlet murks a rise in human culture and a permanent contribution In man", securft) and well-being. Prometheus, tin- fir-biingrr. stands at the beginning ol man's i-oivquest: Foi fire not mere!) made possible the easier digestion .'Í foods, bul its id ni'.- kept olT predatory animal-, ami around the warmth of it. during the eoldei seasons of lite year, an active, -mul ]jie became possible, beyond the mere huddle and vacuity nf the winter's sleep. The slow advances in making tools and weapons and rjtensils dial marked lbe earliei stone periods were t pedestrian conquest ol tin eitvironntcni: gainc by inches. In the neolithic period tame the firsl .cic.it lilt, with the domestication ol plants and animal-, the making of orderly and effective astronomical observations, ami the spread ol   i lelatively peaceful big-slnne civilization in many lands separated over the planet. Fire-making, agriculture, pottery,
astronom) v.....marvi Ilon- collective leaps: tkuninatioos Miliar than
nl iptations. for thousands of years men must have dteamed, vainly, of furlh, i thort-CUtS and eoiitrok
Beyond the great and perhaps relatively -h»rl period "1 řveolnhfc invention the advances, up to the tenth century of our own era. had I,,,,i relatively small except in the use of metal-. Bui the hope of some hirgei rompiest, some more fuiidamental reversal of mans dependent relation upon a merciless and indifferent carnal world , „lltlllll„l „, h,,,,,,, his dreams and even his prayers: Ure myllis and fair) -ion, are a testimony to his desire for plenitude and power, for frei donr of movement and length of days.
Looking at the bird, i......beamed of Bight: perhaps one of he
,.....I universal ol mart envies and desires: Daedalus among lW
Greeks, Avar Ka,->. the living man, among the Peruvian M**, to
.« TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
say nothing of Kali and Neith. Asiaite end Psyche, or the Angels of Giii-liamtv. In the thirteenth century, tins dream reapp«arfld l>i.>|>l<'ii< ally in llie mind ol Rogtsi Bacon. The flying carpet of the Arabian Nights, the --even-leagued bonis, the wishing ling, wen all evidences of the desire to fly. to travel fast, to diminish -.pace, to remove the obstscjc of distance, Along with tills Went a fairly ,.on. Maul de-ire to deliver the body fro* ÍCM infirmities, from its early aging, which dries up iti powers, and from toe diseases that threaten life even in the nndsi pi vigor anil youth. The g-ul- may he defined as beings of somewhat more than hum.in stature that have these POWeCT of defying space and Lime and the Cycle oJ growth and decay: even in the Christian legend llie abilit) to make the lame walk and the blind see is, one of the pun.is of podhood. lmhotep and Aesculapius, b\ IBMOn "I (hen -kili in llie medical aits, were raised into deities by the Egyptians and llie ťieek.-, Oppressed by want and starvalion, the dream of the horn ol plenty ami the Earthly Paradi-i- eontiuued In haunt mm.
It wa- in the North ihat ihese myths of extended powers took on an added firmness, perhaps, from the actual achievements of the miners and smiths: one remembers Tlmr, master of the thunder, whose magic hammer made him so potent: one remembers I.oki. the cunning and mischievous god ol fire: one rememfoea - the gnomes vvho «reated the magic armor and weapons of Siegfried—llin.mnen of the Finns, who made a steel eagle, and Wieland. tin- labulotuj German smilh, who made fcdthrr clothes for flight. Back of all these fables, these colleelive wishes and Utopias, lay llie desire i<> prevail oyer the brute nature of thing-.
Bui the very dreams that exhibited these desires were a revelation of the difficulty of achieving them, 'llie dream give- direction to human activity and both expresses die inner urge of the organism and conjures up appropriate goals. Kul when die dream strides too far ahead of fact, it tends to short-cm mi action: the anticipatory subjective pleasure serves as a surrogate 1m the I bought and contrivance and action that might give it a foothold in reality. The disembodied desire, um onneded with the conditions of its fulfillment or Wtdi lis means of expression, leads nowhere: al most it contributes
M
CULTURAL PREPARATION to an inner equilibrium. How difficult was llie discipline rcquhed before mechanical invention became possible one sees in the part played by magic in the fifteenth snd sixteenth acnturie*.
Magic, like pure fantasy, was i short cm t„ knowledge ami power. But even in the ui"?l primitive form of shaman ism, magie involves a drama and an action: if one wishes lo kill one's enemy by mapic, one must at least mould a wax figure and stick pins into it; and similarly, ii the need foi gold in early capitalism promoted a grand quest for the mean? of Iran-muling ba-e metals into noble ones, it was accompanied by fumbling and frantic attempts to manipulate lbe external environment. Under magic, llie experimenter acknowledged that it was accessary to have a sow'- car In:fore one could make a silk pur-e: tins v\.i- .1 real advance toward matler-of-fact. "The operations." as Lynn Thomdikc well -ay* of magie, "were supposed to be efficacious here in the world of external reality"': magic presupposed a public demonstration rather dian a merely private gratification.
No one can put his linger on lbe place where magic became science, where empirici-m became systematic experimental^) where alchemy be.am. chemistry, where astrology became astronomy, in short, where ihe need for immediate human result, and gratifications ceased lo leave it- smudgy imprint. Magic wa- marked above all perhaps by iwo 1111-. ientific qualities: by secrets and mystifications, and bj a certain impatience for "results." According to Agricoll the tran&rautationists of the sixteenth century did not hesitate to conceal gold in a pellet ol ore, in order to make their experiment came out sin cc-shdh similai dodges, like a concealed dock-winder, were used in the numerous perpetual motion machines that were put forward. Everywhere the dross of fraud and charlatanism mingled with lb- occasional grams ol scientific knowledge that magic udlfced
or produced. . ,
But the instruments of research were developed before a method of procedure was found; and if gold did not come out of lead in the experiments of the alchemists, ihey are not (0 1« reproached tor their ineptitmle but ..mgraiulated on their audacity: their linagina-lions smiled quarry in a cave d.ey could not penetrate, ™*
iiitifln nrtit/ilv :i!KÍ iioth ííXUlf^OS tlíc ífilľfít' U't'f&V Ul  I'll'ti Ul^uiuo
rtr 111' 11 N1, if
41)
TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
having anJ pointing unity ca^ed the hunter* to the -pot. s.......^
,,,,,„. jmpmta.,t ilian gold ''ame out of the researches "1 the aldlcm. ists* the retort and tlie furnaee and the ah-iuhn■: the hahit oi maiiipu-lalinn by crushing, gnnding. fifing, distilling, dissolving- valuable apparatus for real experiments, valuabh- methods for real science, fhe source of authority tor the magicians ceased to be Aristotle and the Fathers of the Church: they relied upon whal their hands couhj do and their eves could sec. with the aid oi mortal and pestle and furnace. Magic rested on demonstration rather than dialectic: more than anything else, perhaps, except painting, it released European thoiight from the tyranny of the written text.
In sum, magic turned men's minds lo the eNtcin.il world: it suggested the need of manipulating it: it helped create the took lor successfully achieving this, and it sharpened observation as to the results. The philosopher's stone was not found, but the science of chemistry emerged, to enrich us far beyond the simple dreams of the gold-seekers. The herbalist, zealous in his quest tor simples and cure-alls, led the way for the intensive explorations of the botanist and ihe physician: despite our boasts of accurate coal lar drugs, one must not forget that one of the few genuine specifics in medicine, quinine, comes from the cinchona bark, and that chnulmnogra oil, used with success in treating leprosy, likewise comes from an exotic tree. As children's play anticipates crudely adult life, so did magic anticipate modern science and technology: it wa- chief)] the lack of direction that was fantastic: the difficulty was not in using the instrument but in finding a field where it could be applied and Hading the right system for applying it. Much of seventeenth century science, though no longer tainted with charlatanism, was just as fantastic. It needed centuries of systematic elloit to develop ihe technique which has given us Ehrlichia salraxsan or Bayer 207. Bui magii mas the bridge that united fantasy with technology: the dream of power with the engines of fulfillment. The subjective confidence of the magicians, seeking to inflate their private egos with b.....ulless wealth and mysterious energies, surmounted even their practical failures: then fiery hopes, their crazy dreams, their cracker! hoinuuculi continued
CULTURAL PREPARATION « to gleam in the a-hes; i„ have dreamed so riotously was to make the technics thai followed loss incredible and hence lose impossible.
ri: Social Regimentation
Il mechanical thinking ami ingenious experiment produced the machine, rifiim ntutinn (rave it u soil to grow in: the social process
"'irked b.....I in hand with the new iileulopy and the new technics,
Long before tlie peoples of the ^ estern World tinned to the machine, medium-in as an element in social life had come into exigence. Before inventors created engines lo lake the place of men. the leaders of men had drilled and regimented multitudes of human beings: they had discovered how to reduce men lo machines. The slaves and peasants who hauled the stones for tilt- pyi.-miids. pulling in rhythm to the crack of the whip, the -laves working in the Roman galley, each man chained to his aeat and unable to pei form any other motion than the limited mechanical one, the order ami march and system of attack of the Macedonian phalanx—these were all machine phenomena. Whatever limits the actions and movements of human beings to their baic mechanical elements belongs to the physiology, if not to the mechanics, of the machine age.
From the fifteenth centurj on invention and regimentation worked reciprocally. The increase in the number and kinds of machines, mills, guns, clocks, lifelike automata, nnisi have suggested mechanical attributes for men ami extended the analogies of mechanism to moie subtle and complex organic f.nts; by the seventeenth century tin- turn of interest disclosed il-df in philosophy. Descartes, in analyzing the physiology of the human body, remarks that its func-tinning apart (mm the guidance of the will does not "appear at all strange to those who are acquainted with die variety of movements performed by ihe different auiutnata, or moving machines fabricated by human industry, and with ihe help of hut a few pieces compared with the great multitude of lames, nerves, arteries, veins, and other parts that are found in ihe body of each animal. Such persons will look upon this body as a machine made by the band of God." But the opposite prn.es> was also true: ihe mechanization of human habits prepared the way for mechanical imilalions.
i   i _ t___
42 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
To the degree that fear and disruption prevail in society, men tend to seek an absolute: if it does not exist, they project it- Regimentation gave the men of the period a finality they could discover nowhere else. If one of the phenomena of the breakdown of the medieval order was the turbulence that made men freebooters, discoverers, pioneers, breaking away from the lameness of the old ways and the rigor of self-imposed disciplines, the other phenomenon, related to it, but compulsively drawing society into a regimented mould, was the methodical routine of the drillmaster and the book-keeper, the soldier and the bureaucrat. These masters of regimentation gained full ascendency in the seventeenth century. The new bourgeoisie, in counting house and shop, reduced life to a careful, uninterrupted routine: so long for business: so long for dinner: so long for pleasure —all carefully measured out. as methodical as the sexual intercourse of Tristram Shandy's father, which coincided, symbolically, with the monthly winding of the clock. Timed payments: timed contracts: limed work: timed meals: from thi> period on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or trie clock. Waste of time became for protectant religious preacher-, like Richard Baxter, one of the most heinous sins. To spend time in mere sociability, or even in sleep, was reprehensible.
The ideal man of the new order was Robinson Crusoe. No wonder he indoctrinated children with his virtues for two centuries, and served as the model for a score of sage discourses on the Economic Man. Robinson Crusoe was all the more representalive as a tale not only because it was the work of one of the new breed of writers, the professional journalists, but because it combines in a single setting the element of catastrophe and adventure with the necessity for invention. In the new economic system every man was for himself. The dominant virtues were thrift, foresight, skillful adaptation of means. Invention took the place of image-making and ritual; experiment took the place of contemplation; demonstration took the place of deductive logic and authority. Even alone on B desert island the sober middle class virtues would carry one through. . . •
Protestantism re-enforced these lessons of middle class Bobriety and gave them God's sanction. True: the main devices of finance
i
I
cultural preparation a were a product of Catholic Europe, and Protestantism has received undeserved praise as a liberating force from medieval routine and undeserved censure as the original source and spiritual justification of modern capitalism. Hut the peculiar office of Protestantism was to unite finance to ihe concept of a godly life and to turn the asceticism countenanced by religion into a device for concentration upon worldly goods and worldly advancement. Protestantism rested firmly on (he abstractions of print and money. Religion wus to be found, not simply in the fellowship of religious spirits, connected historically through the Church and communicating with God through an elaborate ritual: it was to be found in the word itself: the word without its communal background. In the last analysis, the individual must fend for himself in heaven, as he did on the exchange. The expression of collective beliefs through the arts was a snare: so the Protestant stripped the images from his Cathedral and left the bare Stones of engineering: he distrusted all painting, except perhaps portrait painting, which mirrored his righteousness; and he looked upon the theater and the dance as a lewdness of the devil. Life, in all its sensuous variety and warm delight, was drained out of the Protestant's world of thought: the organic disappeared. Time was real: keep it! Labor was real: exert it! Money was real: save it! Space was real: conquer it! Matter was real: measure it! These were the realities and the imperatives of the middle class philosophy. Apart from the surviving scheme of divine salvation all its impulses were already put under the rule of weight and measure and quantity: day and life were completely regimented. In the eighteenth century Benjamin Franklin, who had perhaps been anticipated by the Jesuits, capped the process by inventing a system of moral book-keeping.
How was it that the power motive became isolated and intensified toward the close of the Middle Ages?
Each element in life forms part of a cultural mesh: one part implicates, restrains, helps to express the other. During thia period Ihe mesh was broken, and a fragment escaped and launched iraell on a separate career—the will to dominate die environment To dominate, not to cultivate: to seize power, not to achieve form. One cannot, plainly, embrace a complex scries of events in such simpte t*tf»
W iloTTimani virtues wer« lliritt. tnresnztit. skiUMU adaptation
4-1
TECHNICS ft N D C I V I LI / \ I'll) N
alone! Anotlrei faciei in ili<' change rafcj bftve been due to an intense tied sense oi inferiority: this perhaps .mom- thiough tin- humiliating disparity between man's idea] pretensions ami In- real accomplish* merits—between the charity and peace preached by the Church and its denial wars and feuds and animosities, between the hoi) life a-preached by the saints and the Loach ious life a- lived l>\ the Renascence Pope', between the belief in heaven and the squalid disordei and distress of actual existence, Failing redemption by grace, harmonization of desires, the Chi i-ti.ui virtues, people lought, perhaps, to wipe out their sense of inferiority and overcome theii frustration bj -coking power.
At all events, the old synthesis had broken down jo thought and in social action. In no little degree, it had broken down because it was an inadeipiate one: a dosed, perhaps fundamentally neurotic conception of luiinan life and destiny, which oiiginally had -piung out
of the misery and terror that had attended both the brutality of
imperialistic Koine and it? ultimate put! taction and decay. So remote were the attitudes and concepts of Christianity from the facts of the natural world and of human 1 if.-. that once (he world itself MU opened up by navigation and exploi.ithm, ley lie- new cosmology, by new methods of observation ami experiment, their was no returning to the broken shell of the old order. The split between the Heavenly system and the Earthly one had become too grave to be overlooked, too wide to be bridged: human life had a destiny outside tli.it -hell. The crudest -< ieoce touched i loser to contemporary
truth than the most refined sc|uda»nVi*rn: the ehmi-ie-t -team engine or spuming jenny had more efficiency than the soundest guild regulation, and the paltriest factory and iron bridge had more promise for architecture than the most masterly buildings of Wren and Adam: the first yard of cloth woven bj machine, the fir-a, plain iron casling, had potentially more esthetic interest than jewelry fashioned by a Cellini or the canvas covered by a Reynold* in short: a live machine was belter than a dead organism; and tin- organi-m of medieval culture was dead.
From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth men lived in an empty world: a win Id that was daily growing emptier, They said
(M'LTllRAL PREPARATION «
their prayers, th.-v repeated their formulas; they even nought to retrieve  the holiness they  hud lost by  resurrecting superstition*
they had lout- abandoned: hence the fierceness and hollow fanatic i-m
of the < omilcr-Reformation, its hurtling of heretics, it* persecution ol witches, precisely in the midst of the growing "enlightenment,"
They threw themselves hack into the medieval dream with a new
mtehsit) ol feeling, ii not conviction: they carved and painted and
wrote— who indeed ever hewed more mightily in stone than Michel-,oi;'elo, who wrote with more spectacular ecstasy and vigor than Shakespeare? But beneath the suilaee occupied by ihe-e works of art and thought was a dead world, an empty world, a void lhat no amount of dash and bravura could fill up. The arts shot up into the air in j hundred pulsing fountains, for it i- jnsi al the moment of cultural and social dissolution that the mind often works with a freedom and intensity that i> not possible when the social partem is Btabh- and life a< a whole is more -.-uli-factory: but the idolum itself had become empty.
Men no longer believed, without practical reservations, in heaven and bell and the communion of the saints: still less iJ«,I they believe in the smooth gods and goddesses .md sylphs and muses whom they used, with elegant but meaningless gesture-, to adorn their thoughts and embellish their environment: these supernatural figures, though they were human in oiigin and in consonance with certain stable human need-- had become wraiths. Observe the infant Je-us of a llurl. ■ nth century allarpieee: the infant lies on an altar, opart; the Virgin is transfixed and beatified by tile presence of the Holy Ghost: the myth is real. Observe the Holy Families of the sixteenth and seventeenth century painting: fashionable young ladies are coddlmg their well-fed human infants: the myth has died. First only the gorgeous clothes are left: finally n doll takes the place of ihe living child: a mechanical puppet. Mechanics became the new religion, and it gave to the world a new Messiah: the machine.
«>: The Mechanical Universe
The issues of practical life found their justification and their appropriate frame of ideas in the natural philosophy of the seven-
Iwu'elrv I a-dunned bv
eliild- a mechanical puppet. Mecn.....is nil.nut mm
46 technics and CIVILIZATION
leenth century: this philosophy has remained, in effect, the working creed of technics, even though its ideology ha* been challenged, modified, amplified, and in pari undermined by the further pursuit of science itself. A series of thinkers, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton. Puseal, defined the province of science, elaborated its special technique of research, and demonstrated its elliciicy.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were only scat1 tared efforti of thought, some scholastic, some Aristotelian, tome mathematical and scientific, as in the astronomical observations of Copernicus. Tycho Brahe, and Kepler: the machine had had only an incidental part to play in these intellectual advances. At the end, despite the relative sterility of invention itself during this century, there existed a fully articulated philosophy of the universe, on purely mechanical lines, which served as a starling point for all the physical sciences and for further technical improvements:: the mechanical Wrltbild had come into existence. Mechanics set the pattern of successful research and shrewd application. Up to this time the biological sciences had parallel.nI the physical sciences: thereafter, for at least a century and a half, they played second fiddle; and it was not until after 1800 that biological facts were recognized as an important basis for technics.
By what means was the new mechanical picture put together? And how did it come to provide such an excellent -oil for the propagation of inventions and the spread of machines?
The method of the physical sciences rested fundamentally upon a few simple principles. First: the elimination of qualities, and the reduction of the complex to the simple by paying attention only to those aspects of events which could be weighed, measured, or counted, and to the particular kind of space-lime sequence that could be controlled anil repeated—or, as in astronomy, whose repetition could be predicted. Second: concentration upon the outer world, and the elimination or neutralization of the observer a- respects the data with which be works. Third: isolation; limitation of the field: specialization of interest and subdivision nf labor. In short, what the physical sciences call the world is not the total object of common human experience: it is jusi those aspects of this experience
cultural preparation
dial lend themselves to accurate factual observation and to gen. erulized statements. One may define a mechanical system ai one in which any random sample of ihe whole will serve in place of the whole: an ounce of pure water in the laboratory is supposed to have the same properties as a hundred cubic feet of equally pure water in the cistern and the environment of die object is not supposed to affect its behavior. Our modern concepts of space and time make it seem doubtful if any pure mechanical system really exiita: but the original bias of natural philosophy was to discard organic complexes and to seek isolate which could be described, for practical purposes, as if they completely represented the "physical world" from which they had been extracted.
This elimination of the organic had the justification not only of practical hiiciesi but of history itself. Whereas Socrates had turned hi- back upon die Ionian philosophers because he was more concerned to learn about man'- dilemmas than to learn about trees, rivers, and stars, all that could be called positive knowledge, which hud survived the rise and fall of human societies, were just such non-vital truths a- the Pythagorean theorem. In contrast to the cycles of t.isie, doctrine, fashion, there had been a steady accretion of mathematical and physical knowledge, In this development, the study of astronóm j had been a great aid: the stars could not he cajoled or perverted: then courses were visible to the naked eye and could be followed by any patient observer.
Compere the complex phenomenon of an ox moving over a winding uneven road with the movements of a planet; it is easier to trace an entire orbit than to plot tlie varying rale of speed and the changes of position that takes place in the nearer and more familial object. '!'•> ji\ attention upon a mechanical syilem war the firit ttep totvard creating system: an important victory for rational thought By centering effort npon the non-historic and the inorganic, the physical sciences clarified the entire procedure of analysis: for the field to which they confined their attention was one in whkh the method could be pushed farthest without being too palpably nude* quale or encountering too many special difficulties- But the wA physical world was still not simple enough for the sclentifio method
f I H íl l    u jŕ'Jii
48 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
in ils first stages of development: it was necessary to reduce it to such elements as could be ordered in term-, oi space, time, mass, motion, quantity. The amount of elimination and rejection that accompanied this was excellently described l'\ <.alilco. who pave the process such a strong impetus. One must quote him in full:
"As soon as I form s Conception of a material ur corporeal substance, I simultaneously feel the necessity of conceiving ih.it it has boundaries of some shape or other; that relatively to others it is great or small; that it is in this or that place, in this or that time; that it is in motion or at rest; thai it touches, or does imi touch, another body; that it is unique, rare, or common; nor can 1, by any act of imagination, disjoin it from these qualities. But 1 do not find myself absolutely compelled to apprehend it a.- neir.su ily accompanied by such conditions us that it must be while or red. bitter or sweet, sonorous or silent, smelling sweetly ot disagreeably; and if the senses had not pointed out these qualities language and imagination alone could never have arrived at lln-in. Tier. Ion- I lliiuk that these t.l-les. smells, color-, clc, with regaid       the object itl which
they appear to reside, are nothing more than mere names. They exist only in the sensitive body, for when tlm living creature is removed all these qualities are came.I u!T and annihilated, although we have imposed particular names upon llu in. and would fain persuade ourselves that they truly and in fact exist. I do not believe that there exists anything in externa] bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, etc., except ^v/.<\ shape, quantity, and motion."
In other words, physical science confined Itself to the so-called primary qualities: the secondary qualities are -purned as subjective. But a primary quality is no more ultimate or elementary than a secondary quality, and a sensitive body is no less real than an insensitive body. Biologically speaking, smell was highly important for survival: more so, perhaps, than the ability to discriminate distance or weight: for it is the chief means of determining whether food is fit to eat, and pleasure in odors not merely refined the process of eating but gave a special association to the visible symbols of erotic interest, sublimated finally in perfume. The primary qualities could be called prime only in terms of mathematical
CULTURAL PREPARATION ,w analysis, because they had. as an ultimate point of reference, an independent measuring stick for time and space, a clock, a ruler, a
balance.
The value of concent rating upon primary qualities was dial it neutralised in experiment and analysis the sensory and emotional jeaeti..n.; of the observer: ap.til from die process of thinking, he became an instrument of record. In this manner, scientific technique became communal. Impersonal, objective, within ils limited fold, the purely conventional "material world." This technique resulted in a valuable moralizatirm oi thought: tin; standards, first worked out in realms foreign to man's personal aims and immediate inter-esls, were equally applicable to mole complex aspeiIs of reality that stood closer to his hopes, loves, ambitions. Rut the first effect of this advance in clarity and in sobriety of thought was to devaluate every department oi experieni e except that which lent itself to mathematical investigation. When the Royal Society was founded in England, the humanities were deliberately excluded.
In general, the practice of llie physical sciences meant an intensification of the senses: the eye had never before been so sharp, the ear so kern, ihe hand so accurate. Ilooke, who had seen how'glasses improved seeing, doubted not that "there may be found Mechanical Invention- to improve our other senses, of hearing, smelling, lasting, touching." Bui with this guin in accuracy, went a deformation of experieni e as a whole. The in-iiuineuts of science were helpless in the realm of qualities. The qualitative was reduced to the subjective: the Bubjei live was dismissed as unreal, and the unseen and unmeas-urable in oi existent. Intuition and feeling did not affect mechanical process or mechanical explanations. Much could be accomplished by the new science and the new technics because much that was associated with life and work in the past—art, poetry, organic rhythm, fantasy—was deliberately eliminated. As the outer world of perception grew in importance, the inner world of feeling became more and more impotent.
The division of labor and the specialieation in single parts of an operation, which already had begun to characterise the economic life of the seventeenth century, prevailed in the world of thought:
.i,;l:>,
imindtft d
JS8
50 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
lliey were expressions of the same desire for mechanical accuracy and for quick results. The field of research was progressively divided up, and small parts of it were suhject to intensive examination: in small measures, so to say, truth might perfect he. This restriction was a great practical device. To know the complete nature of an object does not necessarily make one fit to work with it: for complete knowledge requires a plenitude of time: moreover, it tends finally to a sort of identification which lacks precisely the cool aloofness that enables one to handle it and manipulate it for external ends. If one wishes to eat a chicken, one had better treat it as food (torn the beginning, and not give it too much friendly attention or human sympathy or even esthetic appreciation: if one treats the life of the chicken as an end. one may even with Brahniinical thoroughness preserve the lice in its feathers as well as the bird. Selectivity is an operation necessarily adopted by lite organism to keep it from being overwhelmed with irrelevant sensations and comprehensions. Science gave this inevitable selectivity a new rationale: it singled out the most negotiable set of relations, mass, weight, number, motion.
Unfortunately, isolation and abstraction, while important to orderly research and refined symbolic representation, are likewise conditions under which real organisms, die, or at least cease to function effectively. The rejection of experience in its original whole, besides abolishing images and disparaging the non-instrumental aspects of thought, had another grave result: on the positive side, it was a belief in the dead; for the vital processes often escape close observation so long as the organism is alive. In short, the accuracy and simplicity of science, though they were responsible for its colossal practical achievements, were not an approach to objective reality but a departure from it. In their desire to achieve exact results the physical sciences scorned true objectivity: individually, one side of the personality was paralyzed; collectively, one side of experience was ignored. To substitute mechanical or two-way time for history, the dissected corpse for the living body, dismantled units called "individuals" for men-in-groups, or in general lite mechanically measurable or reproducible for the inaccessible and the complicated and the organically whole, is to achieve a limited practical mastery
CULTURAL PREPARATION M
at the expense of truth and of the larger efficiency that depends on truth.
By confining his operations to those aspects of reality which had, so to say. market value, and by isolating and dismembering the corpus of experience, the physical scientist created a habit of mind favorable to discrete practical inventions: at the same time it was highly unfavorable t" all those forms of art for which the secondary qualities and the individualised receptors and motivators of the .irtist were ol fundamental importance. By his consistent metaphysical
principle- .oid in-- I.ietu.il method of research, the physical scientist denuded the world of natural and organic objects and turned his back upon real experience: he substituted for the body and blood of real it) B skeleton of effective abstractions which he could manipulate with appropriate wiie- and pulleys.
What was left was the bare, depopulated world of matter and motion: a wa-tel ind. In order to thrive at all, it was necessary for ihe Inheritors of the seventeenth century idolům to fill the world up
again with new organ tsuis. devised to represent the new realities of physical science, Machines—and machines alone—completely met the requirements of the new scientific method and point of view: they fulhlJed the definition of "reality" far more perfectly than iiving organisms. And once the mechanical world-pietine was established, machines could thrive and multiply and dominate existence: their competitors bad been exterminated or had been consigned to a penumbra 1 universe in which only artists and lovers and breeders ol animals dated to believe. Were machines not conceived in terms of primary qualities alone, without regard to appearance, sound, or any oilier soit of sensory stimulation? If science presented un ultimate reality, then lbe machine was, lrke the law in Gilbert's ballad, the Hue embodiment of everything that was excellent. Indeed in this empty, denuded world, the invention ol machines became a duty. By renouncing a large part of his humanity, a man could achieve godhood: he dawned on ibis second chaos and created the machine in bis own image: the image ol power, but power ripped loose liom his flesh and isolated from his humanity.
54 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
in: TV Duty lo Invent
The principles thai had proved effective in the development, of the scientific method were, with appropriate changes, those that served as a foundation for invention. Technic-; is a translation into appropriate, practical forms of the theoretic truths, implicit or iormulated, anticipated or discovered, of science. Science and technics form two independent yet related worlds: sometimes converging, sometimes drawing apart. Mainly empirical invent ions, like the -team-engine, may suggest Carnot'- researches in thermodynamic-: abstract physical investigation, like Faraday's with the magnetic field, may lead directly to the invention of the dynamo, From the geometry and astronomy of Egypt and Mesopotamia, both closely connected with the practice of agriculture to the latest researches in electro-physics, Leonardos dictum holds true: >. ii-uce is the captain ami practice the soldiers. But somethncs the soldiers win the battle without leadership, and sometimes the captain, by intelligent strategy, obtains victory without actually engaging in battle.
The displacement of the living and the organic took place rapidly with the early development of the machine. For the machine was n counterfeit of nature, nature analysed, regulated, narrowed, controlled by the mind of men. The ultimate goal of il- development was however not the mere conquest of nature but her re-ynthesis: dismembered by thought, nature was put together again in new cambinaLions: material syntheses in chemistry, niechanie.il .syntheses in engineering. The unwillingness to accept the natural envuonment as a fixed and final condition of man's existence had always contributed both lo his art and his technics: but from the seventeenth century, the attitude became compulsive, and it was to technics that he turned for fulfillment. Steam engines displaced horse power, iron and concrete displaced wood, aniline dyes replaced vegetable dyes, and so on down the line, with here and there a gap. Sometimes the new product waB superior practically or esthetically to the old, as in the infinite superiority of the electric lamp over the tallow candle: sometimes the new product remained inferior in quality, as rayon is still inferior lo natural silk: bul in either event the gain was in
I  ANTICIPATIONS OF SPEE
r
1: Rapid land locomotion: the mil-wagon (1598) u»ed by Prince Maurice of Orange, one Of the fust rouimanders lo introduce modern drill. The desire for speed, proclaimed by Hiigci rWm in ihe thirteenth century, lud became insistent by ihe lixleenlh r.m.ir>. Ib-nce skales lor .|ion.
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vnlopmenl nf the auliioinhlle awaited rubber lir«, lie*.,-„,!,,. .! nU^ and liquid fuel.
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CCVT1 KAL PREPARATION 53
the creation ol .111 equivalent prod 11« or synthesis which was less dependent upon uncertain organic variations ami irregularities in eillier the product itseli Ol tne labor applied to it than was the original.
Often the knowledge upon which the displacement was made was insufficient and the result was sometimes disastrous. The history of the la-I thousand years abounds in examples of apparent mechanical si ientific triumphs win- h were fundamentally unsound. One need onlj mini ion bleeding in medicine, the use of common window glass which excluded the important ultra-violet rays, die establishment ní 1I.1 poftl-Liehig dietary on the basis of mere energy replace-in.-nl. thi us' "i the elevated toilet seal, the introduction of steam which .hie- tlie air excessively—but the IÍH is a long and somewhat appalling one. The point is that invention hnd become a ilutv, and tin desire to use the new marvels of technics, like a child's delighted bewilderment over new toys, was not in the main guided by critical discernment: people agreed lhal invention* were good, whether . r       ibey actually provided Inn. bis. just as they agreed lhal child belling was good, whether the offspring proved a blessing Id society or a nuisance.
Mechanical invention, even more than science, was the answer to .1 dwindling faith and a faltering life-impulse. The meandering energies of men. which had flowed over into meadow and garden, had crept      • grotto and cavr, during die Renascence, were turned by invent 1 Lin into a confined head of water above .1 turbine: they could i-parkle ami npplc and cool and revive and delight no more: they were harnessed for « narrow ami definite purpose: to move wheels and multiply society's capacity for work. To live was to work: what other lift, indeed do machines hiau? Faith had at last found a new object, not the moving of mountains, but the moving of engines and machines. Power: the application of power lo motion, and the application of motion to production, and of production to money-mak-inp. and so the further increase of power—this was die worthiest object thai a mechanical habit of mind and a mechanical mode of action put before men. As everyone recognizes, a thousand salutary instruments came out of the new technics; but in origin front the seventeenth century 00 the machine served as a substitute religion.
.'irui m> the lurllier juereasi
54 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
and a vital religion does not need the justification of mere utility.
The religion of die machine needed such support as little an the transcendental faiths it supplanted; for the mission of religion is to provide an ultimate significance and motive-force: the necessity of invention was a dogma, uiid the ritual of a mechanical routine was the binding element in tin- faith. In the eighteenth century. Mechanical Societies sprung into existence, to propagate the i reed with greater zeal: they preached the gospel of work, justification by failh in mechanical science, and salvation In the machine. Without the missionary enthusiasm of the enterprisers and industrialists and engineers and even the untutored mechanics from the eighteenth century onward, it would be impossible to explain the rush of converts and ihe accelerated tempo of mechanical improvement. The impersonal procedure of science, the hard-headed contrivances of mechanics, the rational calculus of the utilitarians—these interests captured emotion, all the more because the golden paradise of financial success lay beyond.
In their compilation of inventions and discoveries, Pairustaedlcr and Du Bois-Iteymond enumerated the following inventor!,: between 1700 and 1750—170: between 1750 and 1800—344: between 1800 and 1850—861: between 1850 and 1900—1150. Even allowing for the foreshortening brought about automatically by historical perspective, one cannot doubt the increased acceleration between 1700 and 1850. Technics had seized the imagination: she engines themselves and the goods they produced both seemed immediately desirable. While much good came through invention, much invention came irrespeclive of the good. If the sanction of utility had been uppermost, invention would have proceeded most rapidly in the departments where human need was sharpest, in food, shelter, and clothing: but although the last department undoubtedly advanced, the farm and the common dwelling house were much slower to profit by the new mechanical technology than were (lie battlefield and the mine, while the conversion of gains in energy into a life abundant took place much more slowly after ihe seventeenth century than it had done during the previous seven hundred years.
Once in existence, the machine tended to justify itself by silently
CULTURAL PREPARATION M
taking over departments of life neglected in iu ideology. Virtuosity is on important clement in die development of technics; the interest in the materials as such, ihe pride of mastery over tools, the skilled manipulation of form. The machine crystallised in new patterns the whole set <>f independent interests which ThorrtBin Veblen grouped loosely under '"the insiinet of workmanship." and enriched technics as a whole even when it temporarily depleted handicraft. The very sensual and contemplative responses, excluded from love-making and song and fantasy by the concentration upnn die mechanical means of production, were not of course finally excluded from life: they re-entered it in association with the technical arts themselves, and the machine, often lovingly personified as a living creature, as with Kipling's engineers, absorbed the affection and care of both inventor and workman. Cranks, pistons, screws, valves, sinuous motions, pulsations, rhythms, murmuis. sleek surfaces, all are virtual counterparts of the organs and functions of the body, and they stimulated and absorbed some of the natural affections. But when thai stage was reached, the machine was no longer a means and its operations were not merely mechanical and causal, but human and final: it contributed, like any other work of art, to an organic equilibrium. This development of value within the machine complex itself, apart from the value of the products created by it, was, as we shall sec at a lat.r sUcr, a profoundly important result of die new technology.
11: Practical Anticipations
From the beginning, the practical value of science was uppermost in the minds of its exponents, even in those who single-mindedly pursued abstract truth, and who were as indifferent to its popularisation as Gauss and Weber, the scientists who invented the telegraph for their private communication. "If my judgment be of any weight,* said Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning, "the use of history mechanical is of all others the most radical and fnndamental towards natural philosophy: such natural philosophy a* shall not vanish in the fume of subtile, sublime, or delectable speculation, hot such as shall be operative to the endowment and benefit of mww life." And Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, oba*r»«« *T«*
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Hi TECHNICS AND CIVILISATION
them [jeenrr.il restrictions re-.pe.tiug physic*] I perceived u u be
possible lo arrive al knowledge highly useful in lit<■: ami in lieu of the speculative pliilosophy usually taught in the schools to discover n practical, by means of which, knowing uV fores and action of fire, water, air, tin stilt, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly a? we blow the various grafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in die same way to all the use- to which they arc adapted, and thus render ourselves the hud- and possessors of nature. And this is a result to he desired, not only in order lo the invention of an infinity of arts, by which we might be aide to enjoy without any trouble the fruits of the earth, .md all its comforts, but also especially for die preservation of lieahh. which 11 with.mi doubt of all blessings of this life the first and fundamental one; for the mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of lire organs of die body thai if any means can oyer be found I" lender men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto. 1 believe that it is in medicine they must be sought for."
Who Í6 rewarded in the perfect commonwealth devised by Bacon in The New Atlantis? In Salomon's House the philosopher and the urti-t and the teacher were left out of account, even though Bacon, like the prudent DeSCtttGB, clung very ceremoniously p. the rites of the Christian church. For the "011luMn.es and riles" of Salomon's House there are two galleries. In one of diesc "we place patterns and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inventions: in the other we place the statues of all principal Inventors. There we have the statue of your Columbus, that discovered the West Indies: also the Inventor of Ships: your monk diat was the Inventur of Ordnance and Gunpowder: the Inventor of Music; the inventor of Letters: the Inventor of Priming: the Invent! oi obscr-vaiions by astronomy: the inventor of Works in Metal: the Inventor of Glass: the Inventor of Silk of the Worm: the Inventor of Wine: the Inventor of Com and Bread: the Inventor of Sugars. ... For upon every invention of value, we erect a statue to the Inventor and give him a liberal and honorable reward." This Salomon's House, as Bacon fancied it, was. a combination of the Rockefeller Institute
S7
C.IJ LTTJRAL PH E r ARATION
and the Deutsche* Museum: tl icxe, if anywhere, was die means inwards the relict of man's estate.
Observe this: there is little that i* vague or fanciful in all these conjecture!! about the new role to be played by science and the ma< bine. The general stall of science hud worked out the strategy of tli, , rttiipaign long before the commanders in the field had developed B tactic- capable of carrying out the attack in detail. Indeed, Usher notes that in tic seventeenth century invention was relatively feeble, and the power of the technical imagination had far outstripped die actual capiicilie- of workmen and engineers. Leonardo, Andreae, Cainpanella. Bacon. Hooke in his Micrographia and Clanviil in his Seep     "' ientifica, wrote down in outline the specifications for
the ii,......!• i : ihe use of -. ieuce for the advancement of technics,
and the direction of technics toward die conquest of nature were the burden -.1 the whole effort. Bacon's Salomon's House, though formulated aliei the s< tual founding of the Aceademia Lynxei in Italy, was the actual starting point of the Philosophical College that first met in 1646 at ihe Bullhead Tavern in Cheaps ide. and in 1662 was duly incorporated as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. This society had eight standing committees, the first of which was to "consider and improve all mechanical inven-tions." The laboratoi ies and technical museums of the twentieth cen-lurv c i-o tl first as a thought in the mind of this philosophical courtier: nothing that we do or practice today would have surprised him.
So confident in the results of die new approach was Hooke that he wrote: "There is nothing that ties within the power of human wit to, i,hi.!i I- fa, more clTctuall of human industry which we might nol compass; we might not only hope for inventions to equalae those of Copernicus. Galileo, Gilbert, Harvey, and others, whose names arc almost lost, that were the inventors of Gunpowder, the Seaman's Compass. Printing, Etching, Graving, Microscopes, Wc.
but mult.....It. that may far exceed them: lor ™ ^
seem to have been tire product of some such methods though bu imperfect: what may no. be therefore expected from 1 .1 d.orough^ prosecuted? Talking and contention of Arguments wouU soonfc turned into labors; all the fine dreams and opimon. -ad unrveml
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W TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
metaphysical nature, which ihe luxury of subtil brains lias devised would ijuickly vanish and give place to solid histories, experiments, and work"-"
The leading Utopia- of the time, Christijuopnlis, tire City of the Sun, to say nothing of Bacon's fragment or Cyrano de Bergerac'a minor works,, all briaiod upon the possibility of utilising the machine to make the world more perfect: the machine was the substitute for Plato's justice, temperance, and courage, even a- it was likewise for the Christian ideals ,,1 grace and redemption. The machine came forth as the new demiurge that was [0 Create a new heaven and a new earth: at the least, as a new Moses: that was to lead a barbarous humanity into the promised land.
There had been premonitions of all this in the centuries before, "1 will now mention." said Roger Bacon, "some of the wonderful Works of art and nature in which there is nothing <>f magic and which magic could not perform. Instrument- ma;, be made by which the largest ships, with only one man guiding them, will be carried with greater velocity than if ihey were full of sailors. Chariots mav be constructed that will move with incredible rapidity without the help of animals. Instruments ol living mav be formed in which a man, silling at bis ease and meditating in anv snlijei t, mav beat the air with his artificial wings after the manner of birds ... as also machines which will enable men In walk at the bottom of seas or
rivers without ships." And Leonardo de \ inci left behind him a list of inventions and contrivances that reads like a synopsis of the present industrial world.
But by the seventeenth century the note of confidence had increased, and the practical jmpul-e had become more universal and urgent. Tlie works of Porta. Cardan, Besson, Kainelli, and other ingenious inventors, engineers, and mathematicians are a witness both lo increasing skill and to growing enthusiasm over technics itself. Schwenter in his Delassemeiits I'hysico-Mntbemuti'pics (1636) pointed out how two individual- con hi communicate with each other by means of magnetic needles. "To them that come after u-," said Glanvill. "it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly to remotest regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey; and
CULTURAL preparation
at
to confer at the distance of the Indies by sympathetic conveyances may be as usual in future times as by literary correspondence." Cyrano de Bergerac conceived the phonograph. Hooke observed that it is "not impossible to hear a whisper a furlong's distance, it having been already done; and perhaps the nature of things would not make it more impossible, although that furlong be ten times multiplied." Indeed, ha even forecast the invention of artificial silk. And Glanvill said again: "1 doubt not posterity will find many things that are now but rumors verified into practical realities. It may he that, some ages hence, a voyage to the Southern tracts, yea. possibly to the moon, will not be more strange than one to America, . . . The restoration oi grej hairs to juvenility and the renewing the exhausted marrow may at length be effected without a miracle; and the turning of the now comparatively desert world into a paradise may not improbably be effected from late agriculture." (1661)
Whatever was lacking in the outlook of tile seventeenth century it was not lack of faith in the imminent presence, the speedy development, and tlie profound importance of the machine. Clock-making: time-keeping:   space-exploration: monastic  regularity: bourgeois order: technical devices: proleslant inhibitions: magical explorations: finally the magistral order, accuracy, and clarity of the physical -• iences iliem.-eUes—all these separate activities, inconsiderable perhaps in themselves, had at last formed a complex social and ideological network, capable of supporting the vast weight ol the machine and extending its operations still further. By the middle of the eighteenth century the initial preparations were over and the kev inventions had been made. An army of natural philosophers, rationalists, experimenters, mechanics, ingenious people, hod assembled who were clear as lo their goal and confident as to their victory. Before more than a streak of grey had appeared at Ihe horizon's rim, they pi ...l.i irned the dawn and announced how wonderful it was: bow marvelous the new day would be. Actually. Uiey were to announce a shift in the seasons, perhaps a long cyclical change in the dhnsle Itself.
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