CHAPTER I.
■ULTURAL PREPARATION
1: Machines, Utilities, and "The Machine"
During the last century the automatic or semiautomatic machine has come to occupy a large place in our daily routine; and we hnve tended to attribute to the physical instrument itself the whole complex of habits and meihnd- ih,i mated i! and accompanied it. Almost every discussion of technology from Marx onward has tended to overemphasize the part played by the more mobile and active parts of our industrial equipment, and has slighted other equally critical elements in our technical heritage.
What is a machine? Apart from the simple machines of classic mechanics, the inclined plane, the pulley, and so forth, the subject remains u confused one. Many of the writer* who have dixuvsed the machine age have treated the machine as if it were a very recent phenomenon, and as if the technology of handicraft had employed only tools to transform the environment. These preconceptions arc baseless. For the last three thousand years, at least, machines have been an essential part of our older technical heritage. Reuleauxs 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 lake us very far. Its place is due to his importance »■ the first great morphologist of machines, for it leaves out the large class of machines operated by man-power.
Machines have developed out of a complex of pon-organic agents for converting energy, for performing work, for enlarging the mc-
9
10 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
chanical or sensory capacities of Ilic human body, or for reducing to a mensurable order and regularity the processes of life. The automaton is the last step in a process that began with 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 i- either to extend the powers, of tl>■ ■ 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 shelters.
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 eve perform complicated actions which are the equivalent, in function, ot .1 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: the skilled tool-user becomes more accurate and more automatic, in short, more mechanical, as his originally voluntary molions settle down into reflexes, and on the other hand, even in the most completely automatic machine, there must intervene somewhere, 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 even more difficult to establish. In general, the machine emphasizes specializa-
CULTUHAI. PREPARATION
11
Hon of function, whereas the tool Indicate! flexibiliiv: n p|llt, machine performs only one operation, whereas n knife can bTused to smooth wood, to carve il. ),. -pin a, or to pry opnn a lock, or to drive in a screw. The automatic machine, then, is n very speciaHiBd kind of adaptation; it involves the notion <»r an external source of power, a more or less complicated inter-relation of parts, and tt limited kind of activity. From the beginning the machine WM a sort of minor organism, designed to perform a single set d functions.
Along with these dynamic elements in technology there is another set, more static 111 character, but equally important in functions While ihe gmvuh of iiiachines is the ni..-t patent lechniral fart of the last thousand yea is, the machine, in the form of the fire-drill or the potter's wheel, has been in existence since at least neolithic times. During ihe earlier period, sume u( the mo-t effective ailapl.timn, «.l the environment came, not from the invention oi machine*, hut from the equally admirable invention <<\ 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 cla-s. The modern period luis finally given us the power utility, like the railroad Uaik or the electric transmission line, which function* only through the operation of power machinery. While tools and machines liamfoim the environment by changing the shape and locution of object-, utensil* and apparatus have been used to effect equally iuvcs-aiv chemical transformations. Tanning, brewing, distilling, dyeing have been as important in man's technical development as smithing or weaving. But most of these processes remained in their traditional state till M middle of the nineteenth century, and it is only since then that th.v have been influenced in any large degree by the same Ml of v mind.: forces and human interests that were developing the modern pew* machine.
In the series of «bje.-n from utensils to utilities there is the same relation between the workman and the process that one notes in the series between tools and automatic machines: differences 1» »> degree of specialization, the degree of impenooallti people's attention is directed most easily to the no
and more
have Ik'i-ti infho-nreil 01 ail
s,
12 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
active parts 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 instruments have all been • luinsilv grouped as machmes. The point to remember is that Ixiih have played an enormous part in the development of the modem environment; and at no stage in history can the two means o( adaptation be split apart. Every technological complex include- both: not 1 is) our modern one.
When I use the word machines hereafter I shall refer to Bpe< ili< objects like the printing press or the power loom. When 1 DS6 the term "the machine" I shall employ it as a shorthand referemv 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 machines proper.
2: The Monastery and the Clock
Where did the machine first take form in modern 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 fiist 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 lime and space underwent an extraordinary change, and no aspect of 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 time 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 lead taken by Salerno in the scientific and medical advances of the Middle Age. It was, however, in the monasteries of the West that the desire for order and power, other than that expressed in the military domination of weaker men, first manifested itself after the long uncertainly and bloody confusion that attended the breakdown of the Roman Empire. Within the walls of the monastery was sanctuary: under the rule of the order surprise and doubt and caprice and irregularity were put at bay. Opposed to the erratic fluctuations ami pulsation- of the worldly life 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 Sabiniaiuis, it was decreed that the bells of the monastery be rung seven limes in the twenty-four hours. These punctuation marks in the day v\cre known as the canoui-cil hours, and some means of keeping count of them and ensuring their regular repetition became necessary.
According to a now 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 those beque-U of the ancient world either left over directly from the days of the Romans, like the water-wheel it-elf. or coming bark ..gam into the W e-t ihiough the Arab-. Rut the legend, as so often happens, is accurate in its implications if not in its 1j<i-. The monastery was the seal of a regular life, and an instrument for -Hiking the hour- at intervals or foi i mi in.ling the bell-ringer that it was time to sinke the bells, was an almost inevitable product of this life. If the me,-|,amca] chirk did not appear until the cities ui the thirteenth century demanded an orderly routine, the habit oi Of*I itself and the canie-| regulation of t.me-scpien. e- had become al.m>-t second nature in the monastery. CoulU.n agree- with Sombart iii looking upon the Benedictine* the great working order, as pnhap-the original founders of modern c..p.iali-m: then rule .■••il.unh KM the curse ofT work nnd their vigoWlW engineering c.teipi ">•'-even have robbed warfare of some of its glamor. So one is n"i straining the fads when one suggests that the monasteries— 11 ""' ''•-re were 40.000 under the Benedictine rule--!" Ipcd W V l,IJ,,u"
np ol tin- mo
second nature in I tic mom
TFCHNTCS AND CIVILIZATION rtterpriue the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for the clock t* DOl merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of mm,.-Iinmizing (he actions of men.
Was it by reason of the collective Christian desire to provide fur lhe wel&W of »uk in eternity by regular prayer* and devotions lhat time-keeping and tbe habits of temporal order took hold of nuu's minis: habits that capitalist civilization prcM.itlv turned to good account? One must perhaps accept the irony of this paradox. At ,,11 events, bj the thirteenth century there are definite record* oi mechanical dock-, and by 1370 a weU-dtsdgned "modexn" dock had been huilt by Heinrich von Wyck at Paris. Meanwhile, bell tOWMl bad GOme into existence, and the new clocks, if they did not have, til) the fourteenth century, a dial and a hand that translated the movement oi tuna into a movement through space, at all ttventcj •trade the hours. The clouds that could paralyze the sundial, the (reeling that ..mid stop the water 'lock on a winter night, i no longer obstacles to time-keeping: dimmer or winter, day or night, one was aware of the measured .lank of the clock. The instrument presently spread outside the monastery: and the regular striking of the bell- brought I new regularity into the life of the workman and the merchant. The bells of the clock tower almost defined 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 the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the out-ianding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous. Here, at the very beginning of modern technics, appeared prophetically the accurate automatic machine which, only after centuries of further effort, wns 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 the idle fancy of some Moslem caliph: inachu.es one find, illustrated in Hero and Al-Jazari. But here was a new kind of
.< llid final
ll MURAL 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 stand-ardized product. In it* iclationship to delernnn.ible quanlities of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, und finally to its own modal product, accurate timing, the clock has been the fore-mot machine in modern technics: and at each period it has remained in the lead: it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire. The clock, moreover, served as a model for many other kinds of mechanical works, and the analysis of mution that accompanied the perfection of the clock, with the various types of gearing and transmission that were elaborated, contributed to the sin-cess of quite different kinds of machine. Smiths could have hammered thousands of suits of armor or thousands of iron cannon, wheelwrights could have shaped thousands of great water-wheels or crude gears, without inventing any of the special types of movement developed in doekwork, and without any of the accuracy of measurement and fineness of articulation lhat 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 from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science. There is relatively little foundation for this belief in commun human experience: throughout the year the days are of uneven duration, and not merely does the relation between day and night steadily change, but a slight journcv I mm K.i-l to West alters astronomical time by a certain number of minutes. In terms of the human organism itself, mechanical lime is even mure foreign: while human life has regularities of its own, the beat of the pulse, the breathing of the lungs, these change from hour to hour with mood and action, and in the hmgei span of days, lime is measured not by the calendar hut by the events that ociups it. The shepherd measures from the lime the ewe* lambed; the farmer measures back la the day of sowing or forward to tbe harvest: if growth has its own duration and regularities, behind it ore not simply matter and motion
16 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
but llie facts of development: in short, history. And while mechanical litnc i» -tiunp out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants, organic time—what Bergson calls Juration-—is cumulative in its effects. Though iii-Tlianir.il time can, in a sense, be speeded up or run baeirward, like the hands of a dock or the Inutgei of B moving picture, organic time moves in only one direction—through I he yde of birth, growth, development, decay, and death—and the past that is already dead remains present in the future that has still 10 be born.
Around 1315. according to Thnrndike, the division of hours into sixty minutes and of minutes into sixty seconds became common: it wa» thi- ali-ii.trt fi.iirirwuik i>1 divided time that became more and more the point of reference for both fiction and thought, and in the effort to arrive at accuracy in this department, the astronomical exploration of the sky foeussed attention further upon the regular, implacable movement- of the heavenly bodies through space. Early in the sixteenth century a young Nuremberg mechanic. l'eler Henlein, is supposed to have created "many-wheeled watches out of small bits of iron*1 und by the end of the century the small dome-tic clock had been introduced in England ami Holland. As with the motor car and the airplane, the richer classes first took over the new mechanism and popularized it: partly because they alone could afford it, partly because the new bourgeoisie were the first to discover that, as Franklin later put it. "time is ;i.....ey." To become "as icgulai as clockwork" was the bourgeois ideal, and to own a watch was for long a definite symbol of success. The increasing tempo of civilization led to a demand for greater power: and in turn power quickened the tempo.
Now, the orderly punctual life that first look shape in the monasteries is not native to mankind, although by now Western peoples are so thoroughly regimented by the cluck that it i- "second nature" and they look upon its observance as a fact of nature. Many Eastern civilizations have flourished on a luose basis in lime: the Hindus have in fact been so indifferent to time that they Jack even an authentic chronology of the years. Only yesterday, in the midst of the industrialization- of Soviet Ru-sui, did a ■mcirtv come ittlo exist-
1 1 LIIHU   F'HI l> W<A HON
17
ence to furtber the carrying of watches there and to propagandize
,1,.. benefits of punctuality. The popularisation ol tinw-kee.....u&fefe
followed the production 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 produi lion.
To keep time was once a peeuliai attribute of music: it gave industrial value to the workshop song or die tattoo or the chantey of thr sailors tugging at a rope. But the effect of the mechanical clo.k is more pen i -he and strict: it presides over the day from tin- hour of rising to the Imur of icst. When one thinks of the day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to bed with llie chickens on a winter** night: one invents wicks, chimney-, lamp-, gaslight-, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed ■'pace: it could be divided, it could be filled up, il could even be expanded by the invention of labor-saving instruments.
Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Otganic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate. not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when oae was tired. hut when the clock sanctioned it. A generalized time-consciousness accompanied the wider use of clocks: dissociating lime from organic sequences, it became easier for the men of the Renascence to indulge the fantasy of reviving the ila-sic past or of reliving the splendors of antique Roman civilization: the cub of history, appearing first in daily ritual, finally abstracted itself as a special discipline. In the seventeenth century journalism and periodic lileralure made ihrir appearance: even in dre«s tpUoV&pJ the lead of Venice as fashion-renter, people altered styles every year rather than every generation.
Thr gain in mechanical efficienej through coordination and through ihe closer articulation of die day's events camel br pes* estimated: while this increase cannot be measured in mere horsepower, one has only to imagine it* absence today to foresee the H.....dy disruption and eventual collapse of our entire society. The
,H TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
modern industrial regime could do without coal and iron and steam
easier than it could do without the clock.
? • Space, Distance, Movement
"A child and an adult, an Australian primitive and a European, a man of the Middle Ages and a contemporary, an distinguished not onlv by a difference in degree, but by a difference Li kind by their methods of pictorial representation."
Dagobert Frey, whose words I haw ju-t .pioted, has made a penetrating study of the difference in spatial conceptions between the early Middle Ages and the Renascence: he has re-en forced by B Wealth of specific detail, the generalization that no two cultures live conceptually in the ?ame kind of time and .-.pace. Spue .ind lime, like language itself, are works of art, and like language they help condition and direct practical action. Long before Kant announced that time and space were categories of the mind, long before the mathematicians discovered that there were conceivable and rational forms of space other thiin the form described by Euclid, mankind at huge had acted on this premise. Like the Englishman in France who thought tli.it bread WB* the right name for le pain each culture believes that every other kind of space and time is an approximation to or a perversion 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 object 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 aposiles or the ten commandments or the trinity. Without constant symbolic reference to 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 he had d'-seribed 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 Bizes on the same plane of vision and at the same distance
CULTURAL PREPARATION „ from the observer was entirely possible for the medieval artist. This tame habit applies not only to the representation ol i.-,,I 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, evi a when approximately known. m;n be represented in an arbitrarj figuir Id., i tree with no regard for the actual relation! as expert Bnced bj a traveller, and with no interest jn anything except the
allegorical correspondence.
One further characteristic of medieval space must be noted: space and time form two relatively independent systems. First: the medieval artist introduced other limes within his own spatial world, as when he projected the events of Christ's life within a contemporary Italian city, without the slightest feeling that the passage of lime has made a difference, ju<t as in Chaucer the classical legend of Troilus and Cressida is related as if it were a contemporary story. When a medieval. hronieler mentions the King, as the author of The Wandering Scholar.- remarks, it is sometimes a little difficult to find out whether he is talking about Caesar or Alexander the Great or his own monarch: each is equally near to him. Indeed, the word anachronism is meaningless when applied to medieval art: it is only when one related events to a co-ordinated frame of lime and space that being out of time or being untrue to time became disconcerting. Similarly, in Botticelli's The Three Miracles of St. Zenobius, three different times are presented upon a single stage.
Because of this separation of lime and space, things could appear and disappear suddenly, una. . miiitablv : tin dropping <•! a -lnp below the horu.on no more needed an explanation than the dropping of a demon down the chimney. There was no mystery about the past from which they had emerged, no speculation as to the future toward wlin li ill, \ weie bound: objects swam into vision and sank out ol it with something of the same mystery in which the coming and going of adults allei Is die evp.i ieucc of young children, whose first graph ic efforts so much resemble in their organization the world of the medieval artist In this symbolic world of space and lime everything was either a mystery or a miracle. The connecting link between
T 1 C Jl NICS AND CIVILIZATION events w a - the eosmic and religious order: the true order of -. even .is the true order bi time was Eternity; Between the fourteenth Wtd the seventeenth century a revolt denary change in the conception of space took place! in Western Europe. Space as a hierarchy ai values was replaced by space M j system of magnitudes. One of the indications of this new orientatioj «.1- the closer study of the relations id objects in space and discovi*ry of the laws of perspective and the systematii organization ol pictures within the new frame fixed by the foreground, tin* horizon and the vanishing point. Perspective Inrned the symbols relation ol objects into a visual relation: the v   1 .1 in turn becirrni a quantitative relation. In the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine importance, hut distance. Bodies did not exist separately a- absolute magnitudes: they  were co-ordinated with other bodies within the >,nne frame of \i ion and must be in scale. To achieve this scale, there must be an accurate ri     -. nl.ition of the nlijei 111-eIf, a point Im [ ■> - in t correspondence Ij< I ween the picture and the image: hence a fresh interest in external nature and in que* lions of fart. The division of the canvas into squares and the accurate observation of the world through this ab-l ict . I    Li board marked the new technique of the painter, from Paolo 1 cello onward.
The new interest 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 op .-vmholie crumbs as taste and him y dictated: iii the new pictures, one's eye followed the lines of linear perspective along streets, buildings, tessellated pavements whose parallel lines the painter purposely introduced in order 10: make the eye itself travel. Even the objects in the foreground were sometimes grotesquely placed and foreshortened in order to crealn the same illusion. Movement became a new source of value: movement for its own sake. The measured space of the picture re-enforced the measured time of the clock.
Within this new ideal network of space and time all events nOW took place; and the most satisfactory event within ibis -v-iem was uniform motion in a straight line, for such motion lent itself to accurate representation within the system of spatial and temporal
CULTURAL. PREI'AHATION a co-ordinates. One further consequence of this spatial order mast llf noted: to place a thing and to time it became essential to one's understanding oi it. In Renascence space, the existence «f object* must he accounted for: their passage through lime ami spacea clue to their appearand at any particular moment in any partictllai place. The unknown is therefore no less determinate lli.n, il„. known: given the roundness of the globe, the position of the Indies could he assumed and the time-distance calculated. The very existence ol Midi an order was an incentive to explore it and to fill up th« parts that were unknown.
What the painter? demonstrated in their application oi perspective, the cartographer - established in the si me centur\ in their new maps. The Hereford Map of 1314 might have been done by a child: it was practically worthless for navigation. That ol' UceuVtj . cm-temporary. Andrea Banco, 14.'i6, was conceived on rational lines, and represented a gain in conception as well as in practii al bi < ncaC] By laying down the invisible lines of latitude .md longitude, the cartograph. is pa\ed the way lor later explorers, like Columbus: Bi with the later scientific method, the abstract sv-lein pave rational expectations, even if on the basis „Í inaccurate knowledge, M« longer w.^ it necessary for the navigator to hug the shore line: lie could launch out into the unknown, set his course toward an arbitrary point, and return approximately to the plaee of departure. Both Ľilcn and Heaven were outside the new space: and though ihej lingered on as the ostensible subjecls of panning, lite real subject* were Time and Space and Nature and Man.
Presently, on the basis laid down b> the painter and the cartographer, an interest in space as such, in movement a- such, in locomotion as such, arose. In back of this inlere-i wi re ol couiW concrete alterations: roads had become more secure, vessels KWO being built more soundly, above all. new invention*—the magtttfK needle, the astrolabe, the rudder—had made it possible to "hurt WW to hold a more accurate course at sea. The gold of ibe Indies and the fabled fountains, of youth and the happy isles of endless s«*wjW delight doubtless beckoned too: but the presence ol these WngU*
I'll i 11.    111«' t F       - t M 11 11 t t \
II ■ UN ICS AND civi1 IZ.yt10n goals does not lesson the importance of the new schemata. The cite-«ones "I tunc mid space, once practically di-ociated, had become united: and the abstractions of measured time and measured specie , r11fri• -11 the earlier conceptions oi infinits and eternity, since m. ;i-ui iiin-nt must begin with an arbitrary here and now even if space and time he empty. The itch to use spa. >■ and time had broken out: and once diey were co-ordinated with movement, the] could be contracted or expanded: the conquest of space and time had begun. (It is interesting, however, to note that the ver) concept of acceleration, which is- part of our daily meelianieal experience, was not formulated till die »-u-nteenth century.)
The signs of this conquest are many: they came forth in rapid succession. In military art- the cross-bow and the ballifita wore revived and extended, and on their heels came more powerful weapon! fur annihilating distanc*—the cannon and later die musket. Leonardo conceived an airplane and built one. Fantastic projects for flight were canvassed. In 1120 Foiitana described a velocipede: in 1589 Cilles de Bom of Antwerp apparently built ;i man-propelled wagon : re 1 tew preludes to the vast efforts and initiatives of the nineteenth century. A-, willt s-o many element- in our culture, the original impulse was imparted to this movement by the Arabs: as early as 880 Abu I-<.la-im had attempted flight, and in 1065 Oliver nf Malmesbury had killed liim-eli' in an attempt to -oar from a high place: but from the fifteenth century on the de-ire to conquer tin- air became a iei uncut preoccupation "[ inventive mind.-; bmiI it was close enough to popular thought to make the report of a flight from Portugal to Vienna serve as a news hoax in 1709.
The new Attitude toward time and space infected the workshop and the counting liou-e. the army and the city. The tempo l>ecamc f*tt£f; the magnitudes became greater: conceptually, modern culture launched itself into -pace and gave itself over to movement. What Max Weber ml led the "romanticism of numbers" grew naturally out o| tin- iniete-a. In ttme-kceping. in trading, in fighting men counted numbers; mid finally, as die habit grew, only numbers counted.
CULTURAL PREPARATION B
!: The Influence Capitalism
The romanticism of numbers had still another aspect, important for the development of SGuntific habits of thought. Tin- was the 11-.-of capitalism, and the change from s barter economy, facilitated by small supplies of variable local coinage, to a money economy with an international credit structure and a n.n-tant reference lo the abstract symbols of wealth: gold, drafts, bills of exchange, eventually merely numbers.
From the standpoint of technique, this structure had its origin in the towns of Northern Italy, particularly Florence and Venice, in the fourteenth century; two hundred years later there was in existence in Antwerp an international bourse, devoted to aiding speculation in shipments from foreign port;, and in money itself. By the middle of die sixteenth century book-keeping by double entry, bills of exchange, letters of credit, and speculation in "futures" were all developed in essentially dieir modem form. Whereas the procedures of science were not refined and codified until after Galileo and Newton, finance had emerged in its piesent-duy drrss at the very beginning of the machine age: Jacob Fugger and J. Picrponl Morgan could understand each other's methods and point of view and temperament far belter Uian Paracelsus and Einstein.
The development of capitalism brought the new habits of abstraction and calculation into the lives of city people: only the country folk, still existing on their more primitive local l.i-i-. were partly immune. Capitalism turned people from tangibles to intangible-: ii-syinbol, as Sombart observes, is the account book: "its life-value lies in its profit and loss account." The "economy of acquisition,"' whu h had hitherto beeu practiced by rare and fabulous creatures like Midas and Croesus, became once more the everyday mode: il Irndcd to replace the direct "economy of needs" and to suhstitute money-valuea for life-values. The whole proces? of business took on moie and more an abstract form; it was concerned with non-commodities, imaginary futures, hypothetical gains.
Karl Marx well summed up diis new process of transmutation: "Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into ,i.
54 TECHNICS AND C I \ 1 L 1 / \ TI 0 N
everything, whether a commodity ta HOt, .....nvtrtihli  into guld.
Everything becomes saleable and purchasable. Circulation is ihe great KM ial retort into which everything is thrown and out of which everything is recovered as crystallized money. Not even the bones of lh< -nnts 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. Hot 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 Wfla particularly important for life and thought: the quest of power by means of abstractions, (.trie 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 direct i into th .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: hut what was to prevent him from seeking by conquest and taxes to multiply by thousands th«- riches in his treasury? Under a money economy, to speed up the process of production was to -peed 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 abracadabra 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 the goods they represented. The typical operations of finance were the acquisition or the exchange of magnitudes. "Even the day-
CULTURAL PREPARATION a dreams of the pecuniary day-dreamer." as Vehlcn observed, "take shape as a calculus of profit and loss computed in standard units of an impersonal magnitude." Men became powerful to the extent that they neglected the real world of wheal and wool, food and clothes, and centered their attention on the purely quantitative representation of it in tokens and symbols: to think in terms of mm weight and number, to make quantity not alone an indication of value but the criterion of value—that was ihe eunirihulion <,f eapilali-in to the mechanical world picture. So Uv abstractions of capitalism preceded the abstractions of modern science and re-enforced at ever] point its typical lessons and its typical mediods of procedure. The ( hit ifical ion and the convenience, particularly for long distance trading in space and time were great: hut the social price of tin N economies was a high one. Mark Kepler's words, puhli-hrd in 1593* "As the ear is made to perceive sound and tin eye to pen 'ive color, so die mind of man has been formed to undei-i.iml. nut .ill sorts of things, but quantities. It perceives any given thing more clearly in proportion as dial thing is close to bare quantities as to its origins, hut the further a thing recedes from quantities, the more darkness and eiror inheres in it."
Was it an accident that the founders and patrons of die Royal Society in London—indeed some of the first experimenters in the physical sciences—were merchants from die City? King Charles II might laugh uncontrollably when he heard Unit these gentlemen had spent their time weighing air; but their instincts were justified, their pTOceduie was correct: the method itself belunged to theil liadin.m. 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 alwtract habits of thought and pragmatic interests and quantitative estimations that cap. talistn prepared the way for modem technics. From the beginning machines and factory production, like big guns and armaments, nftdq dire,, ,|en...n.U for capital far above the small advances necewa.* to provide the old-style l.andic.aft worker wid. tools or keep him alec. The freedom to operate independent workshops and fa. tone*, la u-e
w TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
nflchinea and profit by them, went to thoR who had command of capital. While the icudal families, with their command over the land,
often had a monopoly over such natural n-onm - U win found in the earth, and often retained an interest in glass-making, ,n.d-mining, and iron-works right down to modem time-, the new mechanical inventions lent themselves to exploitation l>\ the merchant classes, '111.' incentive to mechanisation lay m the greatea profits that could he extracted through the multiplied pouci -nd efficiency of the machine.
Thus although capitalism and technics must be clearlv distinguished at every stage, one conditioned the other and reacted upon it. The merchant accumulated capital b] widening the scale of his operations, quickening his turnover, and dj jcoin ring new territories for exploitation: the inventor carried on a parallel process by exploiting new tnelhodt of production and devising new. things to be produced. Sometimes trade appeared a- a rival to the machine by offering greater opportunities foi profit: sometimes it curbed further dc\elopuieiii- in ruder [o increase the profit ol a particular monopoly: hoih motives aie still operative in capitalist society. From the first, there \\i re disparities and conflicts berwe ii tin •••• two forms of exploitation: hut trade "a- tin- older partner and exercised a higher Authority. It Ha- ti.ole ihiit gathered up new materials from the Indies and from the Americas, new foods, new cereuK tobacco, Im-: i! wa-. ir ide thai found a new markel for the trash that was turned out by eighteenth century mass-production: it was trade— abetted bv nai—that developed the large-scale enterprises and the administrative capacity and method that made it po-sible to create the iiidu-iiial systém as a whole and weld together its various parts.
Whether machines would have been invented so rapidly and pushed so zealously without the extra incentive of commercial profit is extremely doubtful: for all the more skilled liarnlieraft occupations were deeply entrenched, and the introduction of printing, for example, ua- delayed as much as twenty years in Paris by the bitter Bppwition of the guild of scribes and copyists. Hut while technics undoubtedly owes an honest debt to capitalism, n» it docs likewise lH war. i| was nevertheless unfortunate thut the machine was condi-
CULTURAL PREPARATION tinned, at the outset, by these foreign institutions .....I took on characteristic - that had nothing essentially to do with the t* hub ,il n.....
esse- or the forms of work. Capitalism utilized the machine, not to further social welfare, but to increase private profit: mechanical instrument wett used for the aggrandizement of the ruling classes, It was because of capitalism thut the handicraft industries in both Europe and other ports of the world were recklessly destroyed b\ machine products, even when the latter were inferior to the tiling they replaced: for the prestige of improvement and success and power was with the machine, even when it improved nothing, even when technically speaking it was a failure. It was became ol the possi Ml'iiii- of profit that the place of the machine wa- overemphasised and the degree of regimental ion pushed beyond uh.il ncce-sary 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 interests. The machine has suffered for the sins of capitalism: contrariwise, capitalism has often taken credit for the virtues of the machine.
By supporting the machine, capitalism quickened its pace, and gave a special incentive to preoccupation with mechanical improvements- though it often failed to ien.,1,1 the iinentm. it succeeded by blandishments and promises in stimulating him to further effort. In many departments the pace was over-accelerated, and the stimulus was over-applied: indeed, the necessity to promote continual changes and improvements, which has been characteristic of capitalism, mlro-duced nn clement of instability into technics and kept society from assimilating its mechanical improvements and integrating the,, in .m appropriate social pattern. As capitalism itself has developed and expanded, these vices have in fact grown more enormous, and the dangers to society as a whole have likewise grown proportional!dy. Enough here to notice the close historical association of modern technics and modern capitalism, and to point out that lot all "lis historical development, there « no necessary connection between them. Capitalism has existed in other civiUalinns. which had a relatively low technical development; and technics made steady im-
28 TSCHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
provrment- from the tend, ... the fifteenth century without the special
„„,.......• „i capitalism- But lite style of the machine has up to t|tc
.„, |l(„, r i.ilK influenced by capitalism: the emphasis upon l„.„,... [,„ example, i8 a commercial trait: it appeared in guild hall, ,„u| hui.I.mm.-- houses long before it was evident in technics, with its originally modest scale of operations.
,r.: 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. Arorjrnd me Iv.rHih century the supernatural world, in uhich the European mind had been enveloped as in a cloud J rum the d.-.-jv of the classic schools oi thou hi onward, began ,,, ii„. beautiful cultui.<f Proveno whose language Dante him-clf had thouglil perhaps to use for his Divine Comedy, was the fir-i bud oi the nev order: a bud destined to be savagely blighted by the Albigerisian crusade.
Even- culture live- within its dream. That of Christianity was one in which 8 fabulous heavenly world, filled with gods, sainl devils,
din.....»ngiarchangels, cherubim and seraphim and dominions
and powers, shot its fantastically magnified shapes and in in: across the actual life >>f earthhorn man. This dream pervades the life of a culture as the fantasies ..I night dominate the mind of a deeper: it
is reality— while the -le.p lasts. But. like the sleeper, a culture lives within an objective world that goes on through its sleeping or waking, and -minim,-- break- int.. >ln- dream, like a noise, to modify it or to make further sleep impn--thle.
By a slow natural process, the world of nature broke in upon [he medieval .beam nf hat] and paradise and eternity: in the fresh nainrali-iic sculpture of the thirteenth century churches one can
wanh the first uneasy crtur ..f the sleeper, as the light of morning -lrd.i> 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 ...pied, tenderly arranged, the sculptor •till • rested strange monsters, gargoyles, chimeras, legendary beasts. 1.....rrsl "' nature steadily broadened and became more con-
CULTUBAl. PREPARATION »,
8uming. The naive feeling of the thirtMNUh century uitUi tamed mm the -y-i'im'iic exploration of the sixteenth century botanists ind
physiologists.
•In the Middle Ages," as Emilc MAI* said, "the idea <>f a thing which a man formed lor himself was always more tcul than the u. lual thing itself, and we see why these mystical centuries had rnj conception of what men now cull science. 11,.. -t,.,K ,,i limit?-- mr their own sake held no meaning for the thoughtful man. . . . The task for the undent oi nature, was t.. di-.eru the eternal truth lh.il (....I would have ea. h thing cxpre«." In e-i ..|.inp lliw aU.tude, the vulgiir had an a.hani.ipe over the learned: ihrir minds were less capable of forging their own shackles. A rati'.n.l mnimoii sense interest in Nature was imt a jiroducl of the new classical learning of die Renascence; rather, one mus| say, that a few centuries alter u bad Hottt-i-hed am.MiL' the peasant- and the masons it made its way l.v another route into die court and the study and the university. Villard <le Honnecourt's notebook, the precious bequest "i ( great maMcr-ma-.m. has drawings of a bear, a swan, a grasshopper, a fly, a dragonfly, a lobster, a lion and a pair of par roquets, nil done directly from life. The hook of Nature reappeared, as in a palimpsest, through the heavenly book of ihc Word.
During the Middle Ages the external world had had no >'piu..l h.dd upon the mind. Natural facts weie insignificant compared wiili the divine order and intention which Christ and hi- Church had revealed: the visible world was merely a pledge and a symbol BJ lh.it Eternal Vimld of whose blisse- and damnations it gave such a keen foretaste. People ate and drank and mated, basked in the siiu am! piew solemn under the Stars; but there was little meaning In tl.U immediate state: whatever significance the items of daily life had was as stage accessories and costumes and rehearsals for of Man's pilgrimage through eternity.        bir could the mind go in scientific mensuration and observation as long as ihe mystic numbers three and four and seven and nine and twelve filled every relation with an allegorical significance. Before Ihe wnoenre* in nature could be -tu.licl. it w.i> iicee-san ).. di>. iphne the i.n.igiuat.on and sharpen the vision: mysli.     "...1 sight must he converted into la.-imd
TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION <n>t Sight. The artists had a fuller part in tin- discipline tlian the} I,,,, uauall) been . edited with. In enumerating the many pan, „f inline that cannot be studied without the "aid and intervening of mathematics," Francis Bacon properly include! perspective, music, architecture, and engineering along with the sciences of astronomy and cosmography.
The change in attitude toward nature manifested itself in solitary figures long before it became common. Roger Be on experimental precepts and hi- special researches in optics have long been common-place knowledge; indeed, like the scientific virion 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. Vi< tor complained lhat 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 violence of the wind, the life of herbs and roots." Dante and Petrarch, unlike meat medieval men, no longer avoided mountains terrifying obstacles that increased the hardships of travel: they SOUghl them and climbed them, for the exaltation that comes from the conquest of distance and the attainment of a bird's-eye (tarda explored the hills of Tuscany, discovered fossils, made correct interpretations of the processes of geology: Agrieola, urged on by his interest in mining, did the same. The herbal; ami 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 toward the delineation of nature: their admirable pictures still witness this. And tbe little books on tbe seasons and tbe 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 wa» a worthy predecessor to Vesalius, whose life overlapped his. In the sixteenth century, according to Beckmnnn. there were numerous private natural history collections, and in 1659 Elias Ashmnle purchased tbe Tradescant collection, which he later presented to Oxford.
CULTURAL PREPARATION n 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 tan ' h   and the travels of Marco Polo and the southward ventures of the Portuguese. Nature existed to be explored, to he 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 pin of the seventeenth century man himself was excluded from the picture. Technics perhaps temporarily profited by this exclusion; but in the long run the result was to prove unfortunate. In alternating to seize power man tended to reduce himself to an abstraction, or, what comes to almost tbe 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 crystal-lize around the sixteenth century rested on a dissociation of the animate and the mechanical. Perhaps the greatest difficulty m tbe way of this dissociation was the persistence ol inveterate habits of 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 cml.Mt.oo of the Assyrians one sees representations of great statues betng moved across bare ground on a sledge. Doubtless the not.on of the wheel came originally from observing that rolling . log was shoving it: but tree, existed for untold years and the £«mjng * trees bad gone on for many thousands, in all likely, before t « neolithic inventor performed the stunning ad of dtssoctsUon that made possible the cart i^j,-,! »non
So iľng a. every object, animate or *«^^T. as the dwelling place of a spirit, so long as one expected tree
iC e|ŕ-.|| j
ti i ii N J1 5 and CIVILIZATION ship (o behave like a living crealure, it was mst In impossible l(J Violate as a mechanical sequence the special function one sough) tq serve. Just as the Egyptian workman, when he made the leg „f fl chair, fashioned it to represent the leg ol a bullock, bo the d. .j,,. naively to reproduce the oi^anic. and to conjure np giants and djirins for power, instead of contriving their abstract equivalent, retarded the development of the machine. Nature often assists in such abstraction: tbe swan's use of it- wing may have suggested the >ail, evei Bj the hornet's ne»t suggested paper. Conversely, the body itself j8 a sort of microcosm of the machine: the arms are levers, the lungs arc bellows, the eyes are lenses, the heart is a pump, the fist ib a hammer, the nerves are a telegraph system connected with a central -1 111on: but on the whole, the mechanical instruments were invented before the physiological functions were accurately described. The most ineffective kind of machine is the realistic mechanical imilalion of a man or another animal: technics remembers Vaueanson for his loom, rather than for his lifelike mechanical dm k, which not merely ale food but went through the routine of digestion and excretion.
The original advances in modern technics became possible only when a merlunical system could be isolated fiotn the entire tissue of relations. No| merely did the first airplane, like dial of Leonardo, attempt to reproduce the motion of birds' wings: as late as 1897 Ader's hatlike airplane, which now hangs in the Conservatoire des Arts el Metiers in Paris had its ribs fashioned like a bat's body, and the very propellers, as if to exhaust all the geological possibilities, were made of thin, split wood, as much as possible like birds* feathers, .Similarly, the belief thai reciprocating motion, as in the
movement of die amis and legs, was the "natural" form of motion was used to justify opposition 10 the original conception of the turbine. Branca *s plan of a steam-engine at the beginning of the seventeenth century showed the boiler in the form of the head and torso of a man. Cireular motion, one of the most 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 fur the rotifers, man himself, in occasional dances and handsprings, is the chief exponent of rotary motion.
CULT l: H A L PREPARATION 33 The specific triumph of the technical imagination rested an the abilitv to d 1-soi iate lifting power front the arm and creute a crane: to dissociate work from the action of men and animals and create tJie water-mill: to dissociate light (rum the cumbustiort of wood and oil and create the eUciiie lamp. For thousands of years animism had stood in the way of this development; (or it h;o! concealed the entire face of nature behind a scrawl of human forms: even the star* were giouped together in the living figures of Castot sei 1'ollux or die Bull on the faintest points of rese.nblunce. Life, not content with ilš own piovmcr, had flowed incoiitini nllv into -tone-, rivers, star*.
and all the natural elements: the external environment, because it was so immediately part of man. remained capricious, mlaelrftsuut, a reflection of his own disordered urges and fears.
Since the world seemed, in essence, animistic, and iince these "external" powers threatened man, die only method of escape thai his own will-to-power rould follow was either the discipline oi the self or the conquest of oihei men: the way of religion or die way of war. 1 shall discuss, in another place, Uie special conn ibutiou that the technique and animus of warfare made t» the development of the machine; as for the discipline of the personality it wis essentially, during the Middle Ages, the province of the Church, and n had gone farthest, of course, not among Ujc peawmt* sod nolde*. Mill dinging to essentially pagan ways of thought, with tdtteft the Church had expediently compromised: it had gone farthest in the monastei Ses and the universities.
Here animism was extruded by a sense of the mnmpoten* <* » Hingle Spun, -fined, by the very enlargement of Bis **"'J»U| °\ any semblance of merely human or animal capunLe,. UmI fan created an orderly world, and his Law prevailed m it- H» were perhap- inscrutable; but they were not capricious: the whole bu.de. of d,e religious l.b- was to create an attitude of humOftj ways of God and the world he had created. II A.."^ľj of the Middle Ages remained supersUtious snd »n^j£^ physical doctrines of the Schoolmen were in fact anU-aoJri"* *■ gist of the matter was that Cod's world was no. man    ■ ^
only the church could form a bridge between man ami me
nit* w j - i" - 'L
The meaning of this division did not fully become apparent until die Schoolmen themselves had fallen into disrepute and their in. heritors, like Descartes, had begun to take advantage of the old breach by describing on a purely mechanical bans the entire world 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 inje. pendent void, as Whitehead has shown in Science and the Modern World, that the work of science could go on ho confidently. The humanists of llie sixteenth century might frequently be sceptics and atheists, scandalously mocking the Church even when they remained within its fold: it is perhaps no accident that the serious scientists of the seventeenth at utury, like Galileo. Di 9cartes, 1 eibniz, Newton, P.i leal, weic so uniformly devout men. The nexi 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 Clockinaker who, having conceived and created -mid wound up the clock of the universe, bad no further re pons bilirj until the machine ultimately broke up—or. as the nineteenth century thought, until the woik- ran down.
The method of science and technology, in their developed forms, implie- .1 -terilization of the self, an eliminati-m, : r as possible, ai die human bias and preference, including the human pleasure in man's nwn 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 of the monastic system and the multiplication of a host of separate communities, dedicated to the living of a bumble and self-abnegating life, under a strict rule? Here, in the monastery, was a relatively non-animistic. non-organic world: the temptations of the body were minimis d in theory and, ite -trim and i> regularity, often minimized in practice—more oflen, at all events, than in secular life. Die effort to exalt the indi-\ idual self ym Suspended in the collective routine.
lake the machine, the monastery was incapable of self perpetuation except by renewal from without. And apart from the fact that women were similarly organized in nunneries, the monastery was like the army, a strictly masculine world. Like the army, again, it sharpened
CULTURAL PREPARATION
and disciplined and foeussed the masculine wflko-power: a succession of military leaders came from the religious orders, while the leader of the. order that exemplified the ideals of the CounterfWoj. ,nation began bis life as a soldier. Une of the first experimental -eientists. Roger Bacon, was a monk; so, again, wa, Michael Stib-I. who in 1544 widened the ui-e of symbols in algebraic equation*; the monks stood high in the roll of mechanics and inventor*. The spiritual routine of the monastery, if it did not positively favor the machine, at leas-t nullified many ol the influences dial worked .u-.un-i ,t \i„| u|1j-i,. ii:-> ipline of the Buddhi-t-. ili.it i,| tl„ Western
monks gave rise to more fertile and complex kinds of machinery dian prayer whet
In ^.iill another way did the institutions of die Church perhaps prepare the way for the machine: in dieir contempt for thr body. Now respect for the body and its organs is deep in all the classic cultures of the past- Sometimes, in being imaginatively projected, the body may be displaced symbolically by the pari- or organs of another animal, as in the Egyptian Horus: but the substitution is made for the sake of intensifying some organic quality, tin- power of muscle, eye. genitals. The phallusea that were Carried in a religious procession were greater and more powerful, by representation, than die actual human organs: so. too, the images of the gods might attain heroic size, to accentuate [heir x it tlit)   Che whole ritual of life in the old cultures tended to empha-i.. A |»>t for the body and to dwell on its beauties and delight- even the monks who painted the Ajanta caves of India were under .1- -pell. The enthronement of die human form in sculpture, and the care ol the body the palestra of the Greeks or the baths of the Roma..-, re-euhmed Vlus inner feeding for the organic.   Tire legend about P-oerusU* typifies the horror and the resentment that classic peoples ' » apa.nM the- mutilation of the body: one made beds to fit human beings, one did not chop off legs or heads to fit bed*-
This affirmative sense of the body surely never disappeared even during .1, triumphs of ChristianitJ : every new pa.r»l over
recovers it through their physical delight ^^^Jj Ihe prevalence of gluttony as a sin during the Middle Ages was
36
I i , .HMDS AND i. I V 11.. I 2 A T10 N
i.. the importance of the bellv. H.it iIn- systematic teiunin, of the Church were directed against the hod) and it. culture: one hand it was a Temple of the Holy Ghost, it was also vile :m -i„ful frj nana,  the flesh tended to corruption, and to aehlev) ,i, pious .-MiIs of life one must moriii', n and subdue it. lessening appetites hv fasting and abstention. Such was the letter of tl,e Chun IT- teaching; and while one cannot -appose that the masi ,,f botnanit; kepi close M the letter, the feeling against the body1! expo-urc. il- u-c». il- i-elebration. was there.
While public bath houses were common in the Middle Ages, eon-traiv to the coinpl.ieeiit superstition that developed after the Renascence abandoned them, those who were truly liol) neglected to bailie the body; they chafed their skin in bait -hiiK I hey whipped them-- Im--. ihev tinned their eyes with charitable interest upon the sore and leprous and deformed. H.iiing the body, the orthodox minds of the Miildl' \ fi - were prepared to do il violence. Instead of resenting the matfhiiu-s that could counterfeit thi- or that action oi the body, could welcome them. The form* oi tin- in.o loin wire nu mote uglv or repulsive than the bodies ol crippled and battered nn-u ■ml women, or, if they were repulsive and ugly, they wen- that much fmiberiwny from being a temptation to the flesh. The writer in the Nnmlieig Chronicle in 1398 might say that "wheeled engines per-loriiiui" strange task* and shows and follies come direct!) from the devil"—but in spite of itself, the Church was creating devil's disciples.
The fact is, at all events, that the machine came most slowly into •cm iiltnie. \m 111 it- 11U'.unserving, life-maintaining functions, while 1' ptOípwred ln-idy předací) in those parts of the environment where the boil v ni- uio,l infamously treated by custom: namely, in the moiiasteiy. in the mini-, on the battlefield.
7: The Road Through Magic
Between fantasy and exact knowledge, between drama and technology, there is an intermediate station: that of magic. Il was in magic that the »cikt.i1 conquest of the external environment was dc..-.,m-|v instituted. Without the ordet that tin- Church provided
CULTURAL PREPARATION
yi
the campaign would possibly have been unthinkable; but without ti„.
wjM, scrambled daring of the magicians the fust
posit inns would not
been taken. For the magicians not tmlj believed in marvel, hm audaciously sought'" wol'k l,u"m: ll>' their straining altei the men tional, the natural philosopher- who followed them were lir-a given „ fine to the regular.
The dream ol conquering nature is one of the oldest lhat has flowed and ebbed in man's mind. Each great epoch in human history in which this will lu- found a positive outlet marks a rise in human culture and a permanent contribution to man's Mcqritj and welt litiu". Prometheus, the fire-btinger, stands at the beginning ol man's conquest: for fire not merely made po--il.)e the eii-.ier digestion of foods, but its flames kept oil predatory anitnuU, and around the warmth nf it. ilniiug the elder se.i-on- of ilie year, an active social life became possible, beyond ihe mere huddle and vacuity of the
winter's sleep. The slow mlvamcs in making tools and we.q.....- uud
utensils dial marked the earlier stone periods wen- a pedestrian conquest ol the environment: gains by inches. In the neolithic period came the fust great lift, with the domestii allot ol plants and animals, the making of orderly and effective astronomical oliservations, and the spread of a relatively peaceful big-lone civilization in mttf lands separated over the planet. Fire-making, agriculture, pottery, astiomiim . w. re ni.i eel lou- i.illeelive leaps: dominations talhiT than adaptations. For thousands of yen- m.-n must have dreamed, vainly, uf further short-cuts and controls.
llevond the great and perhaps .datively short period nf neolithic invention the .mK.io.c-. up In the tenth century of our own era. had been rclalivrl) small except in the use of metal*. Bui the hojj of some larger conquest, some moie fundamental reversal of nr...s dependent relation upon a merciless and indifferent cvterrul wn.L continued to haunt his drc.mn and eve. hi* pi aver.: ihe mvlhs and
fairy stories are a testimony to his desire for pknHade and ,........S
for freedom of movement and length of das-.
looking at the bird, nun dreamed of flight: perhaps one of *e moM lInivprwl, fl) m;in<9 t.nvies and desires: Daedalus among die Greeks, Avar Katsi. the flying man, among the Penman Indians to
i8 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION '1
say nothing of Rah and Neith, Aslartc and Psyche, or the Angela of Christianity. In the thirteenth century, this dream reuppear^ prophetically in the mind of Roger Da. on. The flying carpet of the Arabian Nights, die seven-leagued boots the wi-hing ring, were all evidences of the desire to fly. to travel last, to diminish space, to remove the obstacle of distance. Along with this went a fairly con--l oil desire to dclivei the body from Us infirmities, from it. eurly aging, whii h dues up its power-, and from the diseases that threaten life even in the midst <>l vigor and youth. The gods may he defined as beings of somewhat more than human stature that have these , powers of defying space and time and the cycle of growth and decay: even in the Christian legend the ability to make the lame walk uud the blind see is one of die proofs of godhood. lmhotep and Aesculapius, bv reason of their skill in the medical arts, were raised into deities by the Egyptians and die Greeks, Oppressed by want and starvation, the dream of the horn of plenty and the Earthly Paradise continued to haunt man.
It was in the North thai ihc-e mylh.- of extended powers took on an added firmness, perhaps, from the actual achievements of the miners and smiths one remembers Thor, master of the thunder, whose magic hammer made him su potent: one remembers. Loki. the cunning and mischievous god of fire: one remembers the gnomes who created the magic armor and weapons of Siegfried—llmurincn of the Finns, who made a steel eagle, and Wieland, the fabulous German smith, who made feather clothes for flight. Back of all these fables, these collective wishes and Utopias, lay the desire to prevail over the brute nature of things.
But the very dreams diat exhibited these desires were a revelation of the difficulty of achieving them. The dream gives direction to human activity and hoth expresses the inner urge of the organism and conjures up appropriate goals. But when die dream strides too far ahead of fact, it tends to short-circuit action: the anticipatory subjective pleasure serves as a surrogate for the thought and con-im.iiiee and action that might give it a foothold in reality. The disembodied desire, unconnected with Uic conditions of its fulfillment or with its means of expression, leads nowhere: at most it contributes
Cl 1. T l.' R A I. PREPARATION
J9
to an inner equilibrium. How difficult was the. iliwiplhe required before mechanical invention became possible one sees in die part played by magic in ihe fifteenth and sixteenth century*
Magic, like pure fantasy, was a short cut to knowledge and power. But even in the most primitive form of shamanism, manic involves a drama and an action: if one wishes to kill one's enemy by magic, one must al La-t mould ,1 wax figure and stick pin, into it; and similarly, if the need for gold in early capitalism promoted a grand
quest for ihe mcuns of traiiMnuling base metal- mi., n.,1.1.......„
was accompanied by fumbling and frantic attempts to manipulate die external environment. Under magic, the experimenter acknowledged that it was necessary to have a sow's car before one could make a silk purse: this was a real advance toward matter-of-fact. "The operations" as Lynn Thorndike well -a\- .,1 magic, "were -uppo-cd to be efficacious here in lIn- woihl external reality*': magic pre supposed a public demonstration radier dian a men K private guii-fication.
No one can put his finger on the place where magic became science, where empiricism became systematic expeiimcniahsm, where alchemy became chemistry, where astrology became astronomy, in short, where the need for immediate human result* and gratifications ceased to leave its smudgy imprint. Magic was marked above ail perhaps by two unscientific qualities: by secrets and myrtificaUons, and by a certain impatience for "results.'1 According to Agricoil the transmiitaii.uii-ts of the sixteenth e-enlury did not hesitate to on-real gold in a pellet of ore, in order In make their experiment cine out successfully: similar d-d,--. like a concealed cluck-winder, were used in the numerous perpetual motion in... Innrs thai were ptd forward. Everywhere Uic dross of fraud and charlatanism mingled with the occasional grains of scientific knowledge that magic uulned
or produced. . ,
But Ihe instruments of research were developed before a method of procedure was found; ami if gold did not come out of lead » the experiments of the alchemists, they are nol 10 1* reproached lor dieir ineptitude but congratulated on their audacity: (heir miagma-lions sniffed quarry in a cave they could not penetrate. «"d lb*
40
TECHNICS AND CI\ II I / A TI O N
K«ad pointing 6tt»lt] called shunter, to Iht  pot. -......,|ling
Illolv [„portám tfcm gold came out of the researches of the ,h hem, i-i- die retort and the furnace and the alembic: the halot ol manipu. biim, by crushing, grinding, firing, distilling, dissolving—valuable apparatus for real experiments, valuable methods for real scíenůe. The source of authority for the magicians ceased to be Iristotle n„i 1I„- Fathers of die Church: they relied upon what theil bauds could do and their eyes could see. with the aid of mortar and pestle and j,,j„.„.,.. Maioe rested on demonstration rathex than dialectio: more than anything else, perhaps, except painting, it released European thought from the tyranny of die written text.
In sum, magic turned men's minds to the external world: it -ug-Bcsted the need of manipulating it: it helped create the tools for successful?]; achieving this, and it sharpened lAservation as to the results. The philosopher's stone was not found, but lbe science of chemistry emerged, to enrich us far beyond the simple dreams of die gold-seekers. The herbalist, zealous in his quest for simples and cure-alls., led tin- way for the intensive explorations of the botanist and the physician: despite our boasts of accurate coal tar drugs, one must not forget that one of the few genuine specifics in medicine, quinine, comes from the cinchona bark, and diat chaulmoogra oil, Used with success m treating leprosy, likewise comes from an exotic tree. A& children's play anticipates crudely adult life, so did magic anticipate modern science and technology: it was chiefly the lack of direction dial was fantastic: die difficulty was not in Lining die instrument but in finding a field where it could be applied and finding 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 effort to develop lite technique which has given us Ehrlicb'a salvarsan or Bayer 207. But magic was the bridge that united fantasy with technology: the dream of power with the engine-, of fulfillment. The subjective confidence of the magicians, seeking to inflate then private egos with boundless wealth and mysterious energies, surmounted even dieir practical failures: their fiery hopes, dieir crazy dreams, their cracked homuneuli continued
I II.TtlRAL PHEPARATION .»
ashes: to have dreamed so riotously was to make the
ťi      mi in tin
technic- lhal followed le-s incredihlc anil hence less impossible
8: Social Regimentation
II iM.iliauir.il thinking ami ingenious experiment produced the machine, regimentation gave it a soil to grow in: ihe social process worked hand in hand with the new ideology and the w-w tuchnif -Long before the peoples ol the ^ estcro World turned to the machine* mechanism as an element in social life had come into existence, Befoie inventors created engine-, in take the place of men, the leaders
of men had drilled and regiment* d multitudes of human heme-., they had discovered how to reduce men to machines. The slaves and peasants who hauled the stones for the pyramid-, pulling in rhythm to the crack oi the whip, the -laves working in the Reman gal|r\, each man chained to his -eat and unable to perform any other motion than the limited me< hanical one, the order and march and system of attack oi the Macedonian phalanx—these were all machine phenomena. Whatever limits the actions and movements of human beings to their bate mechanical elements belongs to I he physiology, if not to the mechanics, of the machine age.
From the fifteenth century on invention and regiment ilion worked
reciprocally. The i.....-a-e in the number and kinds of machines,
mills, guns, clocks, lifelike automata, must have suggested mechanical attributes for men and extended the analogies of mechanism lo more subtle and complex organic facts: by the sew.-iileenth century this turn of interest disclosed it-elf in philo-ophy. Descartes, in analyzing the physiology ol the human body, remarks that its Inne-liouiiig apart from the guidance of the will doe- not "appeal at all strange to those who are acquainted with die variety of movements performed by the different automata, or moving machines fabricated by human industry, and with the help of hut a few pieces compared with the great multitude of hones, nerves, arteries, veins, and other pan- that are found in ihe body of each animal Such pcr-ons will look upon (his bod) as a machine made by ihe hand of Cod." Bui die opposite process was also true: the mechanisation of human habits prepared ihe way for mechanical imitations.
TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
To die degree 111.->t fear and disruption prevail in sot iety, 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 el-e. 11 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 die drillmasler and the book-keeper, the •tidier and the bureaucrat These masters oi regimentation gained full ascendency in die seventeenth century. The new bourgeoisie, in counting bouse md shop, reduced life to a careful, uninterrupted routine: so long for hiainess: SO long for dinner: so long for pleasure —all carefully measured out, as methodical as the sexual intercourse of Tristram Shandy's fadier, which coincided, symbolically, with the monthly winding of the clock. Timed payments: timed contracts: timed work: timed meals: from this period on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or the clock. Waste of time became for protestant religious preachers, 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 die Economic Man. Robinson Crusoe was all the more representative 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 him-self. 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 a desert island the sober middle class virtues would carry one through. . . .
Protestantism re-enforced these lessons of middle class 6obriety and gave them God's sanction. True: the main devices of finance
CULTURAL PREPARATION 43 were a product of Catholic Europe, and Protestantism baa received undeserved praise as a liberating force from medieval routine and undeserved censure as die original source and spiritual justification of modern capitalism. But the peculiar office of Protestantism was to unite finance to the 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 the abstractions of print snil money. Religion was to be found, not simply in the fellowship of religious spirits, connected historically through the Church and communicating with God through an elaboiate 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 dirough 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 il- 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 die 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 die Middle Ages?
Each element in life forms part of a cultural mesh: one pari implicates, restrains, helps to express the other. During this pcrii«l the mesh was broken, and a fragment esea|»ed and launched itself on a separate career—the will to dominate the environment. To dominate, not to cultivate: to seiae power, not to achieve form. One cannot, plainly, embrace a complex series of events in such simple terms
loonoMiii virtues were, thrill, toresiatil. skilJliil adapkiUO
«4 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
I lone. Anntlir-i faciei in the change ma) havi been due to an. inun,-i-fied -mi-.-ipJ iiiinioiitv: tlii- perhaps arose through the brnnilintinn dispaniv between man's ideal pretensions and bi- real ae<omplish-ments—between the charity and peace preached hv the t buTch and its eternal wars ami feud- and animosities, between the holy life H preached by lh«' saints and the lasciviou- life a- lived by the Renascence Pope-, between the belief in heaven and the squalid disorder and distress of actual existence. Failing redemption by glace, h unionization ol rle-iies. the t.hi istian virtues. |>eople -ought. [i<-i h:i|>-. to wipe out their sense of inferiority and overcome their frustration by seeking power.
At all events, the old synthesis bad broken down in thought and in MEN id action. In no little degree, it bad broken down because it was an inadequate one: a closed, perhaps fundamentally neurotic COn> CeptJOU of human life and destiny, which originally had sprung out of the misery and terror that had attended both the brutality of imperialistic Rome and its ultimate putrefaction and decay. So remote were the altitudes and concepts of C.ln i-tianilv from the facts of the natural world and of human life, that once the world itself was opened up by navigation and exploration, by die new cosmology, by new methods of observation and experiment, there was no returning to the broken shell of the old order. The split between the Heavenly system and the Earthly one bad become loo grave to be overlooked, too wide to be bridged: human lile bad a destiny otit--ide that shell. The crudest science touched closer to contemporary truth than the most refined scholasticism: the clumsiest steam engine or spuming jenny had more elhriency than the soundest guild regulation, and the paltriest factory and iron bridge had more promise for m. Interline ill.iii the most masterly buildings of Wren and Adam; the first yard of cloth woven by machine, the first plain iron casting, had potentially more esthetic interest than jewelry fashioned by a Cellini or the canvas covered by a Reynolds. In short: a live machine was heller than a dead organism; md the organism of medieval i ulliiie was dead.
From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth men lived in an empty world: a world that was dady growing emptier. They said
CULTURAL PREPARATION 45 their prayers, they repeated iheir formulas; they even sought to retrieve the holiness they hud lost by resurrecting superstition*
the) had long al.....domd: hence tin- fierceness and hollow fanaticism
of the Counter-Reformat ion. Us burning of heretics, its persecution of wiťhes, precisely in the midst of the growing "enlightenment" They threw themselve- back into the medieval dream with 8 new Intensity ol feeling, if not c.mvielion: they carved and painted an.I wrote—\»ho indeed ever hewed more mightily in -tone than Mnliel-angclo, who wrote with more spectacular ecstasy and vigor than Shakespeare? But beneath the surface occupied by dies*; works of art and thought was a dead world, an empty world, a void that no amount of dash .md bravura could fill up. The ait- lhot np into fits air in a hundred pulsing fountains, for il i- just at the moment of cultural and social dissolution that the mind often works with a freedom and intensity that is not possible when the social pattern is stable and life as a whole is more satisfactory: but the idolum itself had become empty.
Men no longer believed, without practical reservation-, in heaven and hell and the communion of the saints: still less did they believe in the -11100th gods and goddc-e- .md sylphs and mils.- whom they used, with cleg.,nt but meaningless gesture-, to adorn their thoughts and embellish their environment: these supernatural figiites. though they were human in oiigin and in consonance with certain stable human needs, bad become wraiths. Observe the infant Jc-u- ol a thirteenth century altarpiece: the infant lies on an altar, apart! the Virgin is transfixed and beatified by the presence of the Holy Ghost: the myth is real. Observe the Holy Families ,,f the úxleeútn
and sevc.......nth century painting:  fashionable young lad if* are
coddling their well-fed human infants: the myth ha- died. First only the gorgeous clothes are led: finally a doll takes the place of the living child: a mechanical puppet. Mecbani. - became the new religion, and it gave to the world a new Messiah; the machine.
9: The Mechanical Universe
The ÍBSUeS of practical life found their justification and their appropriate frame of ideas in the natural philosophy of the seven
46 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
leenth century: this philosophy has remained, in effect, the working creed of technics, even though its ideology has been challenged, modified, amplified, and in part undermined by the further pursuit of science itself. A series of thinkers, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton. Pascal, defined the province of science, elaborated its special technique of research, and demonstrated its efficacy.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were oidy ^altered efforts of thought, some scholastic, some Aristotelian, some mathematical and scientific, as in the astronomical observations of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler: the ma.hine bad had only an incidental part In play in these intellei tit tl ttch tub «•-. \t 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 starting point for all the physical sciences and for further lechnical improvements: the mechanical Weltbild had come into existence. Mechanics set the pattern of successful research and shrewd application. Hp to this time the biological sciences had paralleled the physical sciences: thereafter, for at least a century and a half, they played second fiddle; and it was not until after 1860 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 soil 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 criminal ion 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-time sequence that could be controlled and repeated—or, as in astronomy, whose repetition could be predicted. Second: concentration upon the outer world, and the eliminalion or neutralization of the observer as respects the data with which he works, Third: isolation; limitation of tin; field: specialization of interest and subdivision of labor. In short, what the physical sciences call the world is not the total object of common human experience: it is just those Bspects of tliis experience
IEPAR ATION
4T
that lend themselves to accurate factual observation and to gen-eralized statements. One may define a mechanical system ns one in which any random sample of the whole will serve in place of the whole: an ounce of pure water in the laboratory i» supposed to have the same proper!ics ns a hundred cubic feet of equally pure water in the cistern and the environment of the object is not sup. po-'d to iď, t ji- lii-havior. Our modem concepts of space and time make it scent doubtful if any pure mechanical system really exists: but the original bias of natural philosophy was to discard organic, complexes and to serk i-olati- which could be described, for practical pur/mses, as if they complete!y repn -ented the "physical world" Írom which they had been extract, d.
This elimination of the organic had the justification not only of practical inictest but of history itself. Whereas Socrates had turned his back upon the Ionian philosophers because he was more concerned to learn about man's dilemmas than to learn about trees, rivers, and stars, all that could he called positive knowledge, which had survived the rise and fail of human socieiie-. were just such non-vital truths     the Pythagorean theorem. In contrast to the cycles of tasic. doctrine, fashion, there had been a steady accretion of mathematical and physical know ledge. In this development, the study of astronomy had been a great aid: the stars could not he cajoled or perverted: their course* were visible to the naked eye and could he followed by any paiieui observer.
Cum pa t c 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 the varying rale of speed and the changes of position that takes place in the nearer and more lamdiar object. To fix attention upon a mechanical system tt«* the first step toward creating system: an important victory (or rational thought. By centering effort upon lite non-historic and the inorganic, the physical sciences clarified the entire procedure of analysis: for lite ficid to which they confined their ollention was one in whuh the method could be pushed farthest without being too palpably inadequate or encountering too many special difficulties. But the real physical world was still nol simple enough lor the scientific method
48 TECHNICS  \ND CIVILIZATION
in Eta in f stages of development: it was necessary to reduce it to siirii elements as could be ordered in terms ..t space, time, OU , motion, quantity. The amount of elimination ir..l rejection that ao-coinpaiiicd this WSfl excellently described DJ (.allien, who gave the
process such a strong impetus. One must quote bun in full:
"As soon as I form a conception of a material or corporeal snh-
-.lance. I simultaneously fee! the necessity oi......teiving that it has
boundaries of some shape or other; that relatively to others it k great or small; thai it is in this or that place, in tin- or that time; that it is in motion or at rest; that it touches, or does not touch, another body; that it is unique, rare, or common; nor can I, by any ai I of imagination, disjoin it from these qualities, Bui I do not find myself absolutely compelled to apprehend it as necessarily accompanied by such conditions as that it must be white or red, hitler or sweet, sonorous or silent, smelling sweetly or disagreeably; and if the senses had not pointed out these qualities language and imagination alone could never have arrived at them. Therefore I think that these tastes, smells, colors, etc., with regard to the object in which they appear to reside, are nothing more than mere names. They exist only in the sensitive body, for when the living creature is removed all these qualities are carried off and annihilated, although we have imposed particular names upon them, and would fain persuade ourselves that they truly and in fact exist. I do not believe that there exists anything in external bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, etc., except size, shape, quantity, and motion."
In other words, physical science confined itself to the so-called primary qualities: (lie secondary qualities are spurned 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. Tin; primary qualities could be called prime only in termB of mathematical
i — .1— .i.....i.i,
( ULTCKAL PRE I'ARatId.n analysis, because they had. as an ultimate point of reference, an independent measuring stick for time and space, a dock, a ruler, a
11 dance.
The value of concentrating upon primary qualities was dial it neutralised in experiment and analysis the sensory and emotional reactions of the observer: apart from die process of thinking, he became an instrument of record. In this manner, scientific technique became communal, impersonal, ohjective, within its limited field, the purely conventional "material world." This technique resulted in a valuable moralization of thought: the standards, first worked out in realms I..reign to man's personal amis and immediate interests, were equally applicable to more complex aspects of reality that stood closer to his hopes, loves, ambitions. But the first effect of this advance in clarity and in -..biut\ of thought w.i- to devaluate every department ..f expeticii.. ■ \, < pt that which lent itsell to ii.iil.e-mutical im •.••.ligation. When the Royal Society was founded in England, the humanities were deliberately excluded.
In general, the practice of the physical sciences meant an iriten-i-fication of the senses: the eye had never before been so sharp, the ear so keen, the hand so accurate. Ilooke, who had seen how glasses improved seeing, doubted not that "there may be found Mechanical Inventions to improve our other senses, of hearing, smelling, tasting, touching." But with this gain in accuracy, went a deformation of experience as a whole. The instruments of science were helpless in the realm of qualities. The qualitative was reduced to Uie subjective: the siibje. in- ua- dismissed as unreal, and the unseen and immeasurable nun exigent. Intuition and feeling did not affect mechanical processor : . . b.»iic.il explanations. Modi 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 specialization in single parts of an operation, which already had begun to characterise the economic life of the seventeenth century, prevailed in die world of diought:
SO TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
they were expressions of the same desire for mechanical aOCUT&Cy and for quick results. The field of research was progressively divided up, and small parts of it were subject 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 ohjet t does not necessarily make one fit to work with it: tor complete knowledge requires a plenitude of time: rnureover, it tends finally to a sort of identification which lacks precisely the cool aloofness that enable- one to handle it and manipulate it b>i external end-. If one wishes to eat a chicken, one had better treat it as fooil from the beginning, and not give it too much friendly attention or hitman sympathy or even esthetic appreciation: if one treats the life of the . hi' ken as an end. one may even with Brahntinical thoroughness preserve the lice in its feathers as well as the bird. Selectivity is an operation necessarily adopted by the organism to keep it from being overwhelmed with irrelevant sensations and comprehensions. •• teuce gave this inevitable selectivity a new rationale: it singled out the most negotiable set of relations, mass, weight, number, motion.
f ufortunately, isolation anil 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 ie-u.lt: 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 reulity 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 mcn-in-groups, or in general the mechanically measurable or reproducible for the inaccessihle and lite complicated and the organically whom, is to achieve a limited practical mastery
CULTURAL prfparat10n r>1 at the expen-e of truth and of the larger efficiency that depends on ti nth.
By confining his tapes ilium to those aspect- of reality which had, SO to -ay. market value, mid by  isolating and dismembering the
corpus of experience, the physical scientist created a habit of mmd favorable to discrete practical inventions: at the same time it w-us highly unfavorable to all those forms of art for which the secondary qualities ami the individualized receptors and motivators of the artist were of fundamental importance. By his consistent metaphysical principles and his factual method of research, the physical scientist denuded the world of natural and organic objects and turned his back upon real experience: be substituted for the body and blood of reality a skeleton of effective abstractions which he could manipulate with appropriate wire* and pulleys.
\\ bat was left was the bare, depopulated world of matter and motion: a wasteland. In order to thri\. at all. it was necessary for the inheritors of die seventeenth century iilolum to fill the world up again with new organisms, devised to represent the new realities of physical science. Machines—and machines alone—completely met the requirements of Ute new scientific method and point of view: they fulfilled the definition of "reality" far more perfectly than living organisms. And once the mechanical world-picture was established, machines could thrive and multiply and dominate existence: their competitors had been exterminated or had been consigned to a penumbral universe in which only artists and lovers and breeders of animals dared to believe. Were machines not conceived in terms of primary qualities alone, without regard to appearance, sound, or any other sort of sensory' stimulation? II science presented an ultimate reality, then the machine was, like the law in Gilbert*? ballad, the Hue embodiment of everything that was excellent. Indeed in Ibis empty, denuded world, the invention of machines became a duty. By renouncing a luge part of his humanity, a man could achieve godhood: he dawned on this second chaos and created the machine in his own image: the image ol power, but power ripped loose from his flesh and isolated from his humanity.
52
TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
I. ANTICIPATIONS OF SPEED
10: Tlir Duty to Invent
The priii' fples thai had proved effective in the development of the scientific method were, with appropriate changes, those that served as s foundation for invention. Technics is a translation into appropriate, practical forms of the theoretic truths, implicit or formulated, ami. ipated or discovered, of science. Science and technics form two independent vet related worlds: sometimes converging, sometimes drawing apart. Mainly empirical inventions, like the steam-engine, may suggest Camot's re-searches in thermodynamics; abstract physical inve-lig.ition. like Faraday's with the magnetic tj. Id, may lead directlj to the invention of th   dynamo, From the geometry and astronomy of Egypt and Mesopotemia, both closely connected with the pi.ieti. e of agriculture to the latest researches in electro-physics, Leonardo's dictum holds true: Science is the cap-lain and practice the soldiers. But sometimes 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 a counterfeit of nature, nature analyzed, regulated, narrowed, controlled by the mind of men. The ultimate goal of its development was however not the mere conquest of nature but 1>. r ie-ynthesis: dismembered by thought, nature was put together again in new combinations: material syntheses in chemistry, mechanical syntheses in engineering. The unwillingness to accept the natural environment OS a fixed and final condition of man's existence had always contributed both to 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 engine.-, di-placed hot-- 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 was superior practically or estheticully to the old, as in the infinite superiority of the electric lamp over the tallow caudle: sometimes the new product remained inferior in quality, as rayon is still inferior to nalurul silk: but in either event the gain was in
I
1: Rapid land locomolion: the nail-wagon (1598) UMd by P»n« Maurice „I Orange, one of the foil r„inmanders lo introduce modern drill. The desire lor bp, id, proclaimed l,y Illicit H.i. in the thirteenth century, lud b"»mi insistent by tlie 'xi.Ľiitli SBlmy. Hence skates lur ip
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TinlnralluV Smanim and ihe Eldrri: tin* complete tiiilutc itftvnl • mirror m Si«anni'« \tr\: Sre Chapter It. Section <J, o)hi Chaplci III. Sttl&Hi 6.
i: El^lilwnrh rrniiirr tiiromiliui, or ihe clock«ntl. Vellll,: lllr {trnuIlilMM Itty ' i iiirtftU»ffi »o mfflilunl«m. The nnt ■UM i rnunic symbol
CULTl hal PRE]- \ li \i m . „
the creution of an equivalent product or synthesis which was lew dependent upon uncertain organic variations and irregularities in ••illicr the product itself or tin- labor applied to it than was the original.
Ofleii the knowledge upon which the displacement was made was insuiTieient and the lesiilt was .-omctime-. di-astrous. The history ol the last thousand years abounds in examples of apparent mechanical
and  scientific triumph-,  whnh  were  (undarnentally   Unsound. One
need only meniion bleeding in medicine, the use of common window glass which excluded the important ultraviolet rays, the eslahli-h-nient of the (iie-t-Liebig dietary on the basis of mere energy replacement, Uie use of the elevated toilet seat, the introduction of steam heat, which dries the air excessively—but the list fa a l0Ug nmj somewhat appalling one. The point is that invention had become a duly, and the 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 that inventions were good, whether or not they actually provided benefits, just as they agreed that child-bearing was good, whether the offspring proved a blessing 10 society or a nuisance.
Mechanical invention, even more than science, was ibe answer to a dwindling faith and a faltering life-impulse. The meandering energies of men. winch had (lowed over into meadow and garden, had crept into grotto and cave, during ihe Renascence, were turned by invention into a confined head of water above a turbine: they could sparkle and ripple and cool and revive and delight no more: they were harnessed for a narrow and definite purpose: to wove wheels and multiply society's capacity for work. To live was to work: uhat other life indeed do machines know? faith had at last found a new object, not ihe moving of mountains, but the moving of engines and machines. Power: the application of power to motion, and the application of motion to production, and of production lo money-making, and so the further increase of power—this was the worthiest object that a mechanical habit of mind and a mechanical mode of action put before men. As everyone recognises, a thousand salutary instruments came out of the new technics; but in origin from the seventeenth century on dm machine served as a substitute religion,
TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION and a vila! religion does not need the justification of mere utility.
The religion of die machine needed such support as little as die transcendental faiths it supplanted; for die mission of religion is to provide an ultimate significance and motive-force: the necessity of invention was a dogma, and the ritual of a mechanical routine was die binding element in the faith. In the eighteenth century, Meehauical Societies sprang into existence, to propagate the creed with greater zeal: they preached the gospel of work, justification by faith in mechanical science, and salvation by the machine, w ithout the mis-iouary 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 the accelerated tempo of mechanical improvement. The impci j,on.'il procedure of science, the hard-headed contrivances of mechanics, the rational calculus of the utilitarians—these interests captured emotion, ail the more because the golden paradise of financial success lay beyond.
In their compilation of inventions and discoveries, Darmstaedler and Du Bois-Reymond enumerated the following inventors: 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 die increased acceleration between 1700 and 1850. Technics had seized the imagination: the engines themselves and the goods they produced both seemed immediately desirable. While much good came through invention, much invention came irrespective of the good. If die 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 die common dwelling house were much slower lo profit by the new mechanical technology than were the 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 a taking over departments of life neglected in its ideology. Virtuosity is an important clement in die development of technics; the interest in die materials as such, die pride of mastery over tools, die skilled manipulation of form. The machine crystalliwrd in new patterns the «hule set of independent interests which Thorstein Vehlen grouped loosely under "the instinct 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 .-ong and f.mtasv by the concentration upon ihe mechanical means of production, were nol of course finally excluded from life: they re-entered it in association with the technical arts themselves, and the muchine, often lovingly personified as a living creature, as with Kipling's engineers, absorbed die affection and care of both inventor and workman. Cranks, pistons, screws, valves, sinuous motions, pulsations, rhythms, murmurs, sleek surfaces, all are virtual counterparts of die organs and functions of the body, and they stimulated and absorbed some of the natural affections. But when dial stage was reached, the machine was no longer a means and ils operations were not merely mechanical and causal, but human and final: it contributed, like any odier work of art, to an organic equilibrium. This development of value within the machine complex itself, apart from the value of the products created hy it, was, as we shall sec at a later stage, 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 ils populariia-tion 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, "ihe use of history mechanical is of all others ihe most radical and fundamental towards natural philosophy: such natural philosophy is shall vanish in the fume of subtile, sublime, or delectable speculation, but such as shall be operative to the endowment and benefit of man * life." And Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, observes: "For by
5,1 TECHNICS AND < I % I 1.1 Z A '
them [general restrictions respecting physics] I perceived it to be possible to arrive ai knowledge highly uaeful in Iifej and ta linn ,,f the speculative philosophy usually tuught in the schools to discover a practical, by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that sur-ronnd us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in die same way to all the use-, to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature:. And this is a result to be desired, not only in order to die invention of an infinity of arts, by which we might be able to enjoy without any trouble die fruits of the earth, and «11 its comforts, but also especially for the preservation of health, which is without doubt of all blessings of this life the first and fundamental one; for die mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body that if any means can eyer be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe diat it is in medicine they must be sought for."
Who is rewarded in the perfect commonwealth dovised by Bacon in The New Atlantis? In Salomon's House the philosopher and the orti-t and die teacher were left out of account, even though Bacon, like the prudent Descartes, clung very ceremoniously to the rites of the Christian church. For the "ordinances and rites" of Salomon's House there arc two galleries. In one of these "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 that was the Inventor of Ordnance and Gunpowder: the Inventor of Music: the Inventor of Letters: the Inventor of Printing: the Inventor of observations by astronomy: the Inventor of Works in Metal: the Inventor of Glass: the Inventor of Silk of die 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
CULTURAL PREPARATION 57
and the Denlrfhes Museum: there, if anywhere, was die means towards the relief of man's estate.
Observe diis: there is little that is vague or fanciful in all these conjectures about the new r.Me to lie played by science and the machine. The general staff of science had worked out the -irau-py 0f the campaign long tieli.ie tie   oinm ind.-r- in ilir field had developed a tactics capable of carrying out the attack in detail. Indeed, Usher notes that in the seventeenth century invention was relatively feeble, and the power of the technical imagination bad far outstripped the actual capacities of workmen and engineers. Leonardo, Andreae, Campauell.i, Bacon. Hooke in his Micrographia and Clonviil in his Scepsis Scientifica, wrote down in outline the tpa [fit aiiuns for the new order: the use of science for the advancement of technics, and the direction of technic* toward the conquest of nature were the burden of die whole effort. Bacon's Salomon's House, though formulated alter the actual founding of the Accademia Lynxei in Italy, was the actual starting point of the Philosophical College that first met in 16-16 at die Bullhead Tavern in Cheapside, and in 1662 was duly incorporated as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. This society bad eight standing committees, the first of which was to "consider and improve all mechanical inventions." The laboratories and technical museum- of the twentieth century existed first as a diought in die mind of this philosophical courtier: nothing dial we do or practice today would have surprised bim.
So confident in the results of the new approach was Hooke that he wrote: "There is nothing that lies within the power of human wit (or which is far more effectual) of human industry winch we might no. compass; we might not only hope for tnvenuons to equals diose of Copernicus, Galileo, Gilbert, Harvey, and others, whose name, are almost lost, that were the inventors of Cunpowder he Seaman's Compass. Printing, Etching, Graving. M'^l*^
but multitudes that may far ex......I then.: ^JT^Z
seem .0 have been tire product of some such methmb, A imperfect; wha. may no. be therefore expected ham    "   - 1 .J, ,,„,,,, Talking and contention of Arguments, • ouU *^
prose
turned into
1 a using «"« ----- ... J .....
labors; all the fine dreams and opinio* -nd urn
.ND . I V II r/A TION
metaphysical nature, which the luxury of subtil brains has devised, would .prickly vanish and give place |... -olid histories, experiment,, and works."
The fouling Utopias of the time. Christianopolia, du City of the Sun, to say nothing of Bacon's fragment or Cyrano dc Bergrruc's nmioi work-, .ill brood upon (he possibility of utilising the machine to make Ute world more perfect: the machine was the substitute for Plato's justice, temp.-iam e. and courage, even as it was likewise for the Christian ideals of grace and redemption. The machine came forth as the new demiurge that was to create a new heaven and a new earth: at the least, as a new Moses that was to lead a bar-biinii- humanity into the promised land.
There had been premonitions of all this in the centuries before. "1 will now mention." -aid Roger Bacon, "-ome of the wonderful works of art and nature in which there is nothing of magic and which magic could not perform. Instruments may be made by which the largest ships, with only one man guiding them, will lie carried with greater velocity than if they were full of sailors. Chariots may be constiin ted that will move with incredible rapidity without the help of animals, instruments of (lying may be formed in which a man, sitting at his ease and meditating in any subject, may beat die 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 river9 without ships." And Leonardo de Vinci 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 impulse had become more universal and urgent. The works of Porta, Cardan, Besson, Ramelli, and other ingenious inventors, engineers, and mathematicians are a witness both to increasing skill and to gTowing enthusiasm over technics itself. Schwenter in bin Dclasaeraema Physico-Muthemutiipies (1636) pointed out how two individuals could communicate with each other by means of magnetic needles. "To them that come after us," 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
59
CliLTL'KAL PREPARATION
to confer at the distance of the Indies by sympathetic conveyances di.iv be a- usual in future times us by lit, espondena Cyrano de Bergerac conceived the phonograph. Hooke observed that it is "not impossible to hear a whisper a furlong's diBtance, it having been already done; and perhaps the nature of things would not make it more impossible, ilihoiigh that furlong be ten times multiply, Indeed hi ■ .• n Forecast the invention of artificial silk. And'GUnvfTJ s.,id again: "I doubt not posterity will find many things that are now but rumors verified into practical realities. It may be mat, some ages hence, a voyage to the Soudiern tracts, yea. possibly to the moon, will not be more Strange than one to America. . . . The restoration of grey hairs to juvenility and the renewing the exliausted 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 the seventeendi century it was not lack of faith in the imminent presence, the speedy development, and the profound importance of the machine. Clock-making: time-keeping:   space-exploration: monastic  regularity: bourgeois order: technical devices: prolestant inhibitions: magical explorations: finally the magistral order, accuracy, and clarity of the physical -« iences themselves—all these separate activities, inconsiderable perhaps in themselves, had at last formed a complex social and ideological network, capable of supporting the vast weight of the machine and extending its operations still further. Ry the middle of the eighteenth century the initial preparations were over and the key inventions had been made. An army of natural philosophers, rationalists, experimenters, mechanics, ingenious people, had assembled who were clear as to their goal and confident as to their victory. Before more dian a streak of grey had appeared at the horizon's rim-they proclaimed the dawn and announced how wonderful it was: how marvelous the new day would be. Actually, they were to announce a shift in the seasons, perhaps a long cyclical change in the climate itself.
-       . In- lli.l.i^piiifiik FluoA'lnllieoi il minis HlYtill