CHAPTER I.
CULTURAL PREPARATION
1: Machines Ulitities, and "The Machine"
Durinji the last century the automatic or semi-automatic machine has iimie to occupy a large place in our daily routine; and we have tended to attribute to the physical instrument itself the whole complex of [nihil* and methods that created it and accompanied iu Almost even discussion of technology Írom Marx onward has tended to overemphasize the part played by ihe more mobile and active parU of our industrial equipment, and has flighted other equally critical elements in our technical heritage.
What is a machine? Apart ÍTom the simple machines oi classic mechanics, the inclined plane, the pulley, and so forth, the subject remains u confused one. Many oi the writers who have discussed the machine age have treated the. machine as ii it were a very recent phenomenon, and as it' the technology of handicraft had employed only tools tu transform tlie environment. These preconceptions are baseless. For the last three thousand years, at least, machines have been an essential pari of our older technical heritage. Reuleaux's definition of a machine has remained a classic: "A machine is a combination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain" determinant motions"; but it does not take v very far. Its place is due to his importance as the first great morphologic of machines, for it leaves out the large class oi "** chines operated by man-power.
Machines have developed out of a complex of non-organic for converting energy, for performing work, for enlarging the me*
9
10 technics and civilization
chanieal or sensory capacities of the human body, or for reducing to a mensurable order and regularity the processes of life. The automaton j> the last step in a process that began wilh the use of one part or another of the human body as a tool. In back of the development of tools and machines lies the attempt to modify the environment in such a way as to fortify and sustain the human organism: the effort is either to extend the powers of the otherwise unarmed organism, or to manufacture outside of the body a set of conditions more favorable toward maintaining its equilibrium and ensuring its survival. Instead of a physiological adaptation to the cold, like the growth of hair or the habit of hibernation, there is an environmental adaptation, such as that made possible by the use of clothes and the erection of shelter
The essential distinction between a machine and a tool lies in the degree of independence in the operation from the skill and motive power of the operator: the tool lends itself to manipulation, the machine to automatic action. The degree of complexity is unimportant: for, using the tool, the human hand and eye perform complicated actions which are the equivalent, in function, of a well developed machine; while, on the other hand, there are highly effective machines, like the drop hammer, which do very simple tasks, with the aid of a. relatively simple mechanism. The difference between tools and machines lies primarily in the degree of automatism they have reached: tiie skilled tool-user becomes more accurate and more automatic, in short, more mechanical, as his originally voluntary motions settle down into reflexes, and on the other hand, even hi the most completely automatic machine, there must intervene same-where, at the beginning and the end of the process, first in the original design, and finally in the ability to overcome defects and to make repairs, the conscious participation of a human agent.
Moreover, between the tool and the machine there stands another class of objects, the machine-tool: here, in the lathe or the drill, one has the accuracy of the finest machine coupled with the skilled attendance of the workman. When one adds to this mechanical complex an external source of power, the line of division becomes evert more difficult to establish. In general, the machine emphasizes specialist)-
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n
tion of function, where... the tool indicates flexibility: „ phtninc machine performs only one operation, whereas a knife can be used to smooth wood, to carve it. to split it, or to pry open « lock, or to drive in a screw. The automatic machine, then, is a very speeialiied kind of adaptation; it involves the notion of an external smm;e 0{ p01*er, a more or less complicated inter-relation of parts, and u limited kind of activity. From the beginning the machine was a sort of minor organism, deigned to perform a single set function*,
Along with these dynamic elements in technology there is another set, more static in character, but equally important in function. While the growth of machines is the most potent technical tact of the last thousand years, the machine, in the form of the fire-drill or the potter's wheel, lias been in existence since at least neolithic times. During the earlier period, sorno of the most effective adaptation* of the environment came, not from the invention of machines, but (mm the equally admirable invention of utensils, apparatus, and utilities. The basket and the pot stand £01 the first, the dye vat and the brickkiln stand for the second, and reservoirs and aqueducts and rouds and buildings belong to the third class. The modern period has finally given us the power utililv, like the railroad track or the electric transmission line, which functions only through the operation of power machinery. While tools and machines transform the environment by changing the shape and location of objects, utensils and apparatus have been used to effect equally necessary chemical transformations. Tanning, brewing, distilling, dyeing Imvc been as important in man's technical development as smithing or weaving. But most of these processes remained in their traditional state till the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is only since thm that they have been influenced in any large degree by the same set of scientific forces and human interests that were developing the modern powee machine.
In the series of objects from utensils to utilities there is the same relation between the workman and the process that one notes hi the series between tools ami automatic machines: differences in tn« degree of specialisation, the degree of imper.on.llty. But since people's attention is directed most easily to ** nww
vp l,p«»n i.illinMi.cil in anv larae degree \>\ tire sain*
ii technics and civilization
active pari* of the environment, the role of the utility and the apparatus has been neglected in most discussions of the machine, or, what is almost as had, these technical instrument.'? have all been clumsily grouped as machines. The point to remember is that both have played an enormous part in the development of the modern environment; and at no stage in history can the two means of adaptation be split apart. Every technological complex includes both: not least our modern one.
When I use the word machines hereafter I shall refer to specific objects like the printing press or the power loom. When I use the term "the machine" I shall employ it as a shorthand reference to the entire technological complex. This will embrace the knowledge and skills and arts derived from industry or implicated in the new technics, and will include various forms of tool, instrument, apparatus and utility as well as machine* proper.
2: The Monastery and the Clock
Where did the machine first take form in modem civilization? There was plainly more than one point of origin. Our mechanical civilization represents the convergence of numerous habits, ideas, and modes of living, as well as technical instruments; and some of tliese were, in the beginning, directly opposed to the civilization they helped to create. But the first manifestation of the new order took place in the general picture of the world: during the first seven centuries of the machine's existence the categories of time and space underwent an extraordinary change, and no aspect cf life was left untouched by this transformation. The application of quantitative methods of thought to the study of nature had its first manifestation in the regular measurement of time; and the new mechanical conception of 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 God 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
»
*f i;.,,.. in nart mi* n! ihi» rnntinp nt the rnonasterv.
J
lead taken by Salerno in the scientific and medical advances of the Middle Age. ll was. however, in the monasteries of the West that the desire fo'f order and power, other than that expressed in the military domination of weaker men. fir-l manifested ii-elf after the long ^certainly and bloody confusion that attended the breakdown of the Roman Empire. Within the wall- of the monastery was sanctuary: under the rule al Ihe order surprise and doubt and caprice and irrepulaiity were put at bay. Opposed to the erratic fluctuations and pulsation- ul the worldly life was the iron discipline of the rule. Benedict added a seventh peiiod to the devotions of the day, and in the seventh century, by a hull of Pope Sabiniinus, it was decreed that the bdls of tin- nu'iLi-lery lie mug seven limes in the twenty-four hours. These punctuation marks in the day were known as the camini-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, wmked by falling weights, was invented by the monk named Gerbert who afterwards became Pope Sylvester II near the close of the tenth century. This clock was probably only a water clock, one of lho«e bequests of the ancient world either left over directly from the days of the Romans, like the water-wheel itself, or coming back again into the West through the Arabs. But the legend, as so often happens, accurate in its implications if not in it* facts. The monastery was the seal of a regular life, and an instrument for striking the hours at intervals or for reminding the bell-ringer that it was time to Mi ike the hells, was an almost inevitable product of this life. If the mechanical clock did tint appear until the cities of the thirteenth century demanded an orderly routine, the habit of order il-elf and )],»■ carnesl regulation of time-sciiueiices had become almost second nature in the monastery, Coulton agrees with Somlwirt ID bolting upon the Benedictines, the great working order, as |»erhitp» the original founders of modern capitalism: their rule certainly took the curse off work and their vigorous engineering enterprises may even have robbed warfare of some »f its glamor. So one is nnt straw-'"B the fuels when one suggests that the monastcrie*-J»i one time there were -10.000 under the Benedictine rule—helped to give luinmn
second nature m the monastery. Cttluioii agui
technics and civilization enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.
Was it by reason of the collective Christian desire to provide for the welfare of souls in eternity by regular prayers and devotions that time-keeping and the habits of temporal order took hold of men's minds: habits that capitalist civilization presently turned to good WXMWint? One must perhaps accept the irony of this paradox. At all events, by the thirteenth century there are definite records of mechanical clocks, and by 1370 a well-designed "modern'* clock had been built by Heinrich von Wyck at Paris. Meanwhile, bell towers had come into existence, and the new clocks, if they did not have, till the fourteenth century, a dial and a hand that translated the movement of time into a movement through space, at all events slnick the hours. The clouds that could paralyze the sundial, the freezing that could stop the water clock on a winter night, wen uo longer obstacles to time-keeping: summer or winter, day or night, one was aware of the measured clank of the dock. The instrument presently spread outside the monastery; anil the regular striking of the bells brought a new regularity into the life of the workman and the merchant. The beils 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 die steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and die typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous. Here, at the very beginning of modem technics, appeared prophetically the accurate automatic machine which, only after centuries of further effort, was also to prove the final consummation of this technics in every department of industrial activity. There had been power-machines such as the water-mill, before the clock; and there had also been various kinds of automata, to awaken the wonder of the populace in the temple, or to please the idle fancy of some Moslem caliph: machines one finds illustrated in Hero and Al-WL But here was a new kind of
cultural preparation 15 power-machine, in which the source of power and the transmission were of such a nature as to ensure the even flow of energy throughout the works and to moke possible regular production and a standardized product. In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own -penal product, aeomale timing, die clock has been the foremost machine in modern technic*! and at each period it has remained in Uie lead: it marks a per lection toward which other machines aspire. Tin- clock, moreover, served as a model for many other kinds of mechanical works, and the analysis of motion that accompanied the perfection of the clock, with tin- various types of gearing and transmission (hat were elaborated, contributed to the success of quite different kinds of machine. Smiths could have hammered thousand-- of suits of armor ot thousands of iron cannon, wheelwrights could have shaped thousands of great water-wheels or crude gears, without inventing any of the -p" ij 1 types oi movement developed in clockwork, and without am u| die accuracy <<l measurement and fineness of articulation that finally produced the accurate eighteenth century cliion^meter.
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 oi science. Then is relatively little foundation for this belief in common 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 journey from Eusl to West alters astronomical time by a certain number of minutes. In terms of the human organism itself, mechanical time is even mure foreign: while human life bus 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 longer span of days, lime is measured not by the calendar hut by the events that occupy it. The shepherd measures from the lime the ewes lambed; the farmer measures back to the day of sowing or forward to the harvest: if growth has its own duration and regularities, behind it arc not simply matter and motion
16 TECHNICS AN 0 CIVILIZATION
hill ihe fuels ol development: in short, history. And while mechanical lirne is fining mil in a succession of mathematically isolated instants, organic time—what IWgson call* Juration—i3 cumulative in its effects. Though mechanical time can, in a sense. be speeded up or run backward, like the hands of a clock or the images ol ft moving picinre, organic time move* in only one direction—through the cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death—and the past that is already dead remains present in the futnte that has still (0 he born.
Around 13-15. according to Thorndiko, (lie division of hours into sixty minutes and of minutes into sixty seconds became common: it
was this abstract framework of divided time that became more and
more tlie point of reference for both Action end thought, and in the effort lo arrive at accuracy in this department, the astronomical exploration of the sky focussed attention further Upon I he regular, implacable movements of the he&Venl] bodies through -pace. Early in the sixteenth centurv a young Nuremberg mechanic, Peter Henlein. is supposed U> have created "many-wheeled w.ili lies out of small hits of iron"' and liv the end of the rcnlury the smnll domc-tii thick had hern introduced in England and Holland A« with the motor ear and the airplane, tin- rii her CWSMtl fir«l took over the new mechanism and popularized it: parti) because they alone o.uld afford it, parily beeause the new bourgeoisie were the first i• > discover that, as Franklin later put it. "time i* money."' To become "as reguhu as clockwork" was the bourgeois ideal, and lo own ■ watch was for long a definite svmhol of success. The in. reusing 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 We^icni peoples are so thoroughly regimented by the clock mat ii i* "second nature" and they look upon its observance as a fad of ualure. Many Eastern civilizations have flourished on a loose lusi- in time: the Hindus have in fact been so indifferent to time that they lack even an authentic chronology of the years. Only yesterday, in the midst of the industrialization" of Soviet Russia, did d society come into exist-
1J
CULTURAL PREPARATION ence lo further the carrying of watchea there and lo propaganda the benefits oi punctuality. The populariratioi) of time-keeping, which followed the production of the cheap standardized watch, first in Geneva, then in America around the middle of the last cem'nry, was essential to a well-articulated sv Mem of transportation and production.
To keep time was once n peculiar attribute of music: ii guve industrial value i" the workshop song or the tattoo or the chantey of ihe sailor- tugging at a rope. But the effect of the mechanical elork is more pervasive and strict: ii presides over the day Irmn the hour of rising to ('"•• hour of rest. When one thinks of the day as an abstract Span of tinip, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter's night: one invent- wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of time, not ;» a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minute-, .mil seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took mi the character of an enclosed spare: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded by die invention of labor-saving instruments.
Abstrai 1 time be< aine 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 one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it, A generalized time-consciousness n companied the wider use of clocks: dissociating time from organic sequences, it became easier for the men of the Renascence to Indulge the fantasy «f reviving the classic past oi of reliving the splendors of antique Roman civilization: the cull of history, appearing first in daily ritual, finally abstracted itself as a special discipline. In the seventeenth century journalism and periodic literature made their appearance: even in dress, following the lead of Venice as fanhion-ceitler, people altered style* every year rather ilian every generation.
Tin* gain in mechanical efficiency through co-oidmaUo» through the closer articulation of the day's events cannot be W» csiimaied: while this increase cannot be measured In mere home* pnwer, one ha* only lo imagine its absence today to fores*lj* speedy disruption and eventual collapse of our eeliw mUf* U»
T l.-.f.
it;
Iain  ui medianjca
i8 technics and civilization
modern industrial regime could do without coal and iron and steam
easier than it could do without the clock.
3: Space, Distance, Movement
"A child and an adult, an Australian primitive and n European, a man of the Middle Ages and a contemporary, are distinguished not only hy a difference in degree, but by a difference in kind by their methods of pictorial representation."
Dagobert Frey, whose words I haw ju-t .[noted, ha* made a penetrating study of the difference in spatial conception* between the early Middle Ages and the Renascence: he has re-enforced by a wealth of specific detail, the generalization that no two cultures live conceptually in the same kind of time and space. Space and time, like language itself, are works of art, tind like language they help condition and direct practical action. Long before Kant announced lhat time and space were categories of the mind, long before the mathematicians, discovered that there were conceivable and rational form* of space other than the form described by Euclid, mankind at large had acted on this premise. Like the Englishman in France who thought that bread was the right name for /<> 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 apostles or the ten commandments or the trinity. Without constant symbolic reference la 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 described the seven coverings of the eye he added that by such means God had willed to express in our bodies nn image of the seven gifts of the spirit.
Size signified importance; to represent human beings of entirely different sizes on the same plane of vision and at the same distance
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from the observer was entirely possible for the medieval artist. This same habit applies not only to the representation of real objects but to the organization of terrestrial experience by means of the map. In medieval cartography the water and the land masses of the earth, even when approximately known, may be represented in an arbitrary hgui.' like a tree, with no regard for the actual relations as experienced by a traveller, and with no interest in anything except the allegorical correspondence.
One further characteristic of medieval space must he noted: space and time form two relatively independent ?\items, First: the medieval .irii^t introduced other time* within his own spatial world, as when be projei ted the events of Christ's life within a contemporary Italian i-itv. without the slightest feeling that the passage of lime has made a dill reiice, just a> in Chancer the classical legend ní Tmilus and Cresaida is related as if it were a contemporary stoty. When a medieval I bronicler mention- the King, as the author of The Wander-ing Scholars lem.irks. it is sometimes a little difficult to find out whelhei he is talking about Caesar or Alexander the Great or his own mou an h: each is equally near to him. Indeed, the word anachronism is meaningless when applied to medieval art: il is only when one related events to a co-ordinated frame of time and space Uiat being out of time or b'iug untrue to lime became disconcerting, r Similarly, in Botticelli's The Three Miracles of St. Zenobius, three different tunc* ,ne presented upon a single slage.
Ben tu-.' oi this separation of lime and ipsce, things could appear and disappear suddenly, unaccountably: the dropping of a íhípbeluw the horizon no more needed an explanation than the dropping of a demon down th>- chimney, There was no mystery about the past from which ihej bad emerged, no speculation as to the future toward which they were bound: objects swam into vision and sank out of it willi something of ihe same mystery in which the coming and going of adults iff nets the experience of young children, whose first graphic efforts so much resemble in iheir organization the world of the medieval artist. In this symbolic world of space and lime every-lliing was either a mystery or a miracle. The connecting link between
TECHNICS AND UVUUATION events was the cosmic and religious order: tin- true order of wast Heaven, even as the true order of time was Eternity.
Between the fourteenth mid the seventeenth century a revolt tionary change in the conception of space took place in W«iom Europe. Space as a hierarchy of values wan replaced by space a* q system of magnitudes. One of the indications of tins new orientation was the closer study of the relations of objects in space and the discovery of the laws of perspective and the systematic organization of pictures within the new frame fixed by the foreground, tin-horizon and the vanishing point. Perspective tinned the symbol^} relation of objects into a visual relation: the visual in turn became a quantitative relation. In the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine Importance, but distance. Bodies did not exist separately as absolute magnitudes: they were co-ordinated with other bodies within the same frame of vision and must be in scale, To achieve this scale, there must be an accurate representation of the object itself, a point for point correspondence between the picture and the image: hence a fresh interest in external nature and in questions of fart. The division of the canvas into squares and the accurate observation of the world through this abstract checkerboard marked the new technique of the painter, from Paolo Ucello onward.
The new in tares) in perspective brought depth into the picture and distance into the mind. In the older pictures, one's eye jumped from one part to another, picking up symbolic crumbs as taste and fancy dictated: in the new pictures, one's eye followed the lines nf linear perspective along streets, buildings, tessellated pavements whose parallel lines the painter purposely introduced in order to make the eye itself travel. Even the objects in the foreground were sometimes grotesquely placed and foreshortened in order 1o create the-same illusion. Movement became- it new source of value: m< ment for its own sake. The measured space of the picture re-enfnn die measured time of the clock.
Within this new ideal network of space and time all events n> took phice; and the most satisfactory event within this system was uniform motion in a straight  line, for sin h motion Ifnt itself lq accurate representation within die system of spatial and terripoi
CULTURAL ľ ItEľ AHATlON
21
co-ordinates. One further consequence of ibis spaliul tt«for mtm Le noted: to place a thing and to lime it became essential to one's understanding of it. In Rerias.crmee space, the existence of iihject* must be accounted for: their passage through time and space is a clue to their appearance at any particular moment in any parlirsular place. The unknown is therefore no less determinate than die known* given the roundness of the globe, the position of the Indies could lie assumed and the time-distance calculated. The very existence of such an order was an incentive to explore it and to fill up the parts that were unknown.
What the painters demonstrated in their application of pcrspftc-tive, the cartographers established in the same century in their new maps. The Hereford Map of 1314 might have been done by a child: it was practically worthless for navigation. That of L'celto's coo, temporary, Andrea Banco, 1436, was conceived on rational line.:., and represented a gain in conception as well a.- in practical smir.iry. By laying down the invisible lines uf hiiilude and longitude, the cartographers paved the way for later explorers, like Columbus: a* with the later scientific method, the abstract system gave rational expectation^ even if on the basis of inaccurate knowledge. No longer was it necessary for the navigator to hug the shore line: he could launch out into the unknown, sei his course toward an arbitrary point, and return approximately to the place ol departure. Both Eden and Heaven were outside the new splice; mid though they lingered on as ihe ostensible subjects ni painting, the real subjects were Time and Space and Nature and Man.
Presently, on the basis bud down by the painter and the cartographer, an interest in space as such, in movement as such, in locomotion us such, arose. In back nf this interest were of course man concrete alterations: roads bad become mori: secure, vessels wef» being built more soundly, above all, new inventions—the magnetic needle, die astrolabe, the rudder—had made it possible to chart and to hob! a more accural e course at sea. The gold of die Indies and die fabled fountains of youth and the happy isles of endless stfHUAl delight doubtless beckoned too: but die presence of dtWS Wngu*
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TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION goals does not lessen the importance of the new schemata. The categories Of time and space, once practically dissociated, had become united: and the abstractions of measured time and measured space undermined the earlier conceptions of infinity and eternity, since measurement must begin with an arbitrary here and now oven if space arid time he empty. The itch to use space and time had broken out: and once they were co-ordinated with movement, they could be contracted or expanded: the conquest of space and time had begun. (It is interesting, however, to note that the verj concept of acceleration, which is part of our daily mechanical experience, was not formulated till the seventeenth century.)
The signs of this conquest are many: thtty came forth in rapid succession. In military arts the cross-bow and the ballista were re-vived and extended, and on their heels came more powerful weapons for annihilating distance—the cannon and later the musket. Leonardo conceived an airplane and built one. Fantastic projects for Night were canvassed. In Id20 Fonlana described a velocipede: in 1589 Cilles de Bom of Antwerp apparently built a man-propcllcd wagon: ic.-tless preludes to the vast efforts and initiatives of the nineteenth century. As with so many elements in our culture, the original impulse was imparted to this movement by the Arab-: as early as 880 Abu l-Q&sim had attempted Bight, and in 106S Oliver of Malmesbury had killed him-elf in an attempt to -oar from a high place; but from the fifteenth century mi the de-ire to conquer the air became a recurrent preoccupation of inventive minds: and it was close enough to popular thought to make the report o! i Bighi from Portugal to Vienna serve as a new- hoax in 1709.
The new attitude toward time and space infected the workshop and the counting house, the army and the <it\. The tempo became faster: the magnitudes became greater: conceptually, modern . uliuxc launched itself into -pace and gave it-elf over to movement. What Max Weber called the "rom.iiuii ism of numbers" grew naturally out of this interest, In timekeeping, in trading, in lighting men counted numbers; and finally, as the habit grew, only numbers counted.
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1: The Influence of Capitalism
The romanticism of numbers had still another aspect, important for the development of scjimtine habits of thought. This trot the rise
of capitalism, and the change from I baiter economy, facilitated by small supplies of variable local coinage, to a money economy wilh an international credit structure and a constant reference to the abstract symbols of wealth: gold, drafts, bills of exchange, eventually merely numbers.
From the standpoint of technique, 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 porta and in money itself. By the middle of the sixteenth century book-keeping by double entry, bills of exchange, letters of credit, and speculation in "futures" were all developed in essentially their modem form, ^"hereas the procedures of science were not refined and codified until after Galileo and Newton, finance had emerged in its present-day dress at the very beginning of the machine age: Jacob Fugger and J. Picrponl Morgan could iih.ii-i-lain! each other's methods and point of view and temperament far better than Paracelsus and Einstein.
The development of capitalism brought the new habitt of abstraction and calculation into the Uve9 of city people: only the country folk, still existing on their more primitive local basis, were partly immune. Capitalism turned people from tangibles to intangibles: it* symbol, as Sombart observes, is the account book: "its life-value lies in its profit and loss account." Tire "economy of acquisition," which had hitherto been practiced by rare and fabulous creatures like Midas mid Croesus, became once more the everyday mode: it tended to replace the direct "economy of needs" and to substitute ranney-vahiea for life-values. The whole process of business took on more and more an abstract form; it was concerned with non-commodities, imuginiiry futures, hypothetical gains.
Karl Mnr* well summed up this new process of U-aosmuUtiort:-"Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into fe.
it.*, ilireei "reonomv ol needs  ami to suusuuru1 mouir
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TECHNICS AND C t V I L I / \ T I O N
everything, whether a commodity or nut, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and purchasable. Circulation is the great social retort into which everything is thrown and out of which everything is recovered as crystallized money. Not even the bones of the saints are able to withstand this alchemy; and still less able to withstand it are more delicate things, sacrosanct things which are outside the commercial traffic of men. Just as all qualitative differences between commodities are effaced in money, so money, a radical leveller, effaces all distinctions. Hut money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable .if becoming the private property of an individual. Thus social power becomes private power in the hands of a private person."
This last fact was particularly important for life and thought: the quest of power by means of abstractions. One abstraction re-enforced the other. Time was money: money was power: power required the furtherance of trade and production: production was diverted from the channels of dircci use into those of remote trade, toward the acquisition of larger profits, with a larger margin for new capital expenditures for wars, foreign conquests, mines, productive enterprises . . . more money and more power. Of all forms of wealth, money alone is without assignable limits. The prince who might desire to build five palaces would hesitate to build five thousand: but what was to prevent him from seeking by conquest and taxes to multiply by thousands the riches in his treasury? Under a money economy, to speed up the process of production was tu speed up the turnover: more money. And as the emphasis upon money grew in part out of lite increasing mobility of late medieval society, with its international trade, go did the resulting money economy promote more trade: landed wenlth, humanized wealth, houses, paintings, sculptures, books, even gold itself were all relatively difficult to transport, wherea- money could be transported after pronouncing the propel 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 die good- they represented. The typical operations of finance were the acquisition or the exchange of magnitudes. "Even lite day*
tivetv dJllicult to transnort. whereas inoiiev could be transported alter
CULTURAL HMEPARATION 25 Atmmt of die pecuniary day-dreamer." as Veblen observed, "lake shape as a calculus of profit and loss computed in standard unit* of an impersonal magnitude." Men became powerful to the extent that lliey neglected the real world of wheal and wool, food and cloibcs, and centered their attention on the purely quantitative rep-1« - illation of it in tokens and symbols: to think in term* of mere weight and number, to make quantity nut alone an indication of value ttut th<* criterion of value—that was the contribution of capitalism to        mechanical woild-pielare. So the abstractions o[ capitalism preceded the abstractions of modern science and re-enfoiced at every point i!- typical lessons and its typical methods of pioccdure. The . hi 1 ilieal ion and ihe Convenience, partit ularly for long distance trading in -pace and tune were great: but the social price of these economies was a high one. Mark Kepler's words, published in 1595: "A- the car i- made to perceive sound and the 01: to perceive color, so the mind of man has been formed to understand, not all sorts of things, but quantities. It perceives any given thing more clearly in proportion as dial, thing is close to hare quantities as to its origins, hut the further a thing recedes from quantities, die more darkness and error inheres in it."
Was it an accident that the founders and patrons of the Royal Societ) in London—indeed some of the first experimenters in ihe physical sciences—were merchants from the City? King Charles 11 might laugh uncontrollably when lie heard dial these gendemen had spent their time weighing air; but their instincts were justified, their procedure was correct: die method itself belonged to their tradition, and there was money in it. The power that was science and die power that was money were, in final analysis, the same kind of power: the power of abstraction, measurement, quantification.
But it was not merely in the promotion of abstract habits of (bought and pragmatic interest, and quantitative estimationslb«t capitalism prepared the way for modem technics. From the beginning machines and factory production, like big guns and armaments, made direct demands for capital far above lbe small advances necessary to provide die old-style handicraft worker with tools or keep him nfive. The freedom to operate independent workshops and factories, to use
o6 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
madiines and profit by them, went to tJlOM who liad command of capital. While the feudal families, with their command over the laud, often had a monopoly over such natural resources .is were found in the earth, and often retained an interest in glass-making, coal, mining, and iron-works right down to modern tunes, the new mechanical invention-- lent themselves, to exploitation by the men-hunt classes, The incentive to mechanization lay in the greater profits that could he extracted through the multiplied power and efficiency of the machine.
Thus, although capitalism and technics must be clearly distinguished at ever) stage, one conditioned the other and reacted upon it. The merchant accumulated capital bj widening the si ale of his operations, quickening his turnover, and discovering new territorial for exploitation: the inventor carried on a parallel process by exploiting new methods of production and devising new things to be produced. Sometimes trade appeared .1- .1 rival to the machine by nJlering greater opportunities foi profit: sometimes it curbed further dcvelopmenu in order to increase the profit of a particular monopoly: both motives are still operative in capitalist society. From the first, there were disparities and conflicts between these two forms of exploitation: but trade was the older partner and exercised a higher authority. It was trade that gathered up pew materials from the Indie-, and iioin tl..- \mertcas, new foods, new cereal-, tobacco, I in-: it was trade that found a new market for the trash that was lurried "Hi by eighteenth centuiy ma--production: it was trade— abetted by wai—that developed the large.-, ale enterprises arid the .i.Jiiniii-iiative rapacity and method that made it possible to create the industrial *vMom as a whole and weld together its various parts.
Whether machines would have been invented so rapidly and pushed M zealously without llie extra incentive of commercial profit is extremely doubtful: for all the more skilled h.-mdicr.i It occupations were deeply cntiniched, and the introduction of printing, for example, was delayed as much as twenty years in Paris by the bitter oppn-ilioii of the guild of sciil.es and copvi-ts. But while technics Undoubtedly owes an honest debt to capitalism, as it docs likewise Itt wur, it was nevertheless unfortunate that the machine was condi-
13 1   Ml"  III!   Iv   IJOIIMIIUI.   I'"l   d I I   Ml*    Mil M '
- r 11e 11 11,1111111 I.
cultural preparation
27
tioned. at the outset, by these foreign institutions and took on characteristic > that had nothing essentially to do with die leehiiieal processes or the forms of work. Capitalism utilized the machine, not to further social welfare, but to increase private profit; mechanical instruments were used fur the aggrandizement of the ruling classes. It was because of capitalism that the handicraft indu-tii,.-s in both Europe and other parts of the world were recklessly destroyed by machine products, even when the latter were inferior to the thing they replaced: for the prestige of improvement anil success and power was with th<' machine, even when it improved nothing, even when technically speaking it was .1 failure. It was because of the possibilities of profit that the place of the machine was overemphasized and the degree of regimentation pushed beyond what was necessary to luumonv or efficiency. It was because of certain trails 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 inlercts. The machine has suffered for the sins of capitalism; contrariwise, capitalism has often taken credit for the virtues of the machine.
lly supporting the machine, capitalism quickened its puce, and gave a special incentive to preoccupation with mechanical improvements: though it often failed to reward the inventor, it succeeded by blandishments .md promises in stimulating him to further effort. In many departments the pace was over-accelerated, wild the stimulus was over-applied: indeed, the necessity to promote continual changes and improvements, which has been characteristic of capitalism, intro-durcd an element of instability into technics and kept society from assimilating its mechanical improvements and integrating them in an appro,.,iate social pattern. As capitalism itself lu.s developed and expanded, these vices have in fact grown more enormous, and the dange.s to society as a whole have likewise grown proportionately, Enough here to notice the .lose historical association of modem technics and modern capitalism, ami to point out that, for all this historical development, there is no necessary connection between them. Capitalism has existed in other civilizations, which had * relatively low technical development; and technics made steady iw
28
Tti:n
ntcs and civilization
proveroents feom the tenth to the fifteenth century without the special ,niT„i,vr of cftWiWliam. But ihe style of the nadrine ha. uP to Uie-present been powerfully i"***1 l,v '•1PiullsIti: [hp «F»*» higiK-cs. for example, is a commercial trait; it appeared in guild halls :„m1 men-1.111.1-' hnn-cs long hefore it was evident in technics, with its
originally nuidwl scale ef operations. 5; From Fable to Fact
Meanwhile, with the Han-formation of the concepts of time and space went a charge in the direction of interest from the heavenly world to. the natural one. Around the twelfth Century the supernatural •world, in which the European mind had been enveloped as in a cloud from the decay of the classic schools of thought onward, began to lift: the beautiful culture of Proveiine whose language Dante himself had ihought perhaps lo use fur his Divine Comedy, was the first hud of the new order: a bud destined to be savagely blighted by I he AUngensian crusade.
Everv enliure lives within its dream. That of Christianity was one in which a fabulous heavenly world, filled with gods, saints, devilj, demons, anpN. archangels, cherubim and seraphim and dominions an) powers, shot its fantastically magnified shapes and images across the iirtu.il life df e.irihhorn man. This dream pervades the life of a culture us the fantasies of night dominate the mind of a sleeper: it is reality—V\hile the -Jeep lti-ts. But. like the sleeper, a ruilure lives within an objective World lhal goes on through its sleeping or waking, and sometimes breaks into the dream, like a noise, 10 modify it or to make further sleep impossible.
By a slow natural process, the world of nature broke in upon the medieval dream of hell and paradise and eternity: in the fresh' naturali-tic sculpture of the thirteenth century ebtliebes one can wahh ihe first uneasy -tir of the sleeper,, as the Sight of inoruing -iriko Ins eyes. At first, the craftsman's interest in nature was a confused one: side by side with the fine carvings of oak leaves and hawthorn sprays, faithfully copied, tenderly arranged, the sculptor still - rented strange monsters, gargoyles, chimeras. legendary beasts. But the interest in nature steadily broadened and became more con-
M I I l II u. PREPARATION
29
Burning. The naive feeling of the thirteenth century artist turned mto the systematic exploration of the sixteenth century botanist, ind
physiologists
•In the Middle Ages,*1 as Entile M.'de -nid, '-the idea of a thing which a man formed for hinisrif was always mure mil than the achiul tiling il-elf, and we see why these mystical ecnturit-, had no con-,, ption uf what men now cull science. The study of thing* for their own -akr held no meaning for the ihougluful nun. . . . The ^k jus the student of nature was to discern the eternal truth that God
would have cull llnrip express." In escaping this utlitude, the vulgar
had an advantage over the learned: thrir minds were less capable of forging their own shackles. A rational common sense interest in Nature w.is nol a product of the new . las-it al learning of the Reus* centre; rather, one must sav. thai a few reniunet ader it had flourished amone ihe [,. ..-.ml- and the ma-ons, it made it-, w.iy by another route intn the court and the study and the university, \ ill,ml ile Honnecourl'fi notebook, the precious hi-.pie-t ol a preal maMer-masuii. has drawing? "1 a bear, a -Man, a gras-hopper, a By, a dragonfly a lobster, a lion and a pair of parroquets, all done direeily from life. The book of Nature reappeared, as in a palimpsest, through the heavenly, book of the Word.
During the Middle Ages the < sternal world had had no conceptual bold upon the mind. Naluial facts were insignificant compared ivitl.
the divini.....hr and ititciilioll which Chri-1 and his Guireh hud
revealed: lb. \i-iblc world was merely a pledge and a symbol .<l lb.if Eternal Wmld of whose blisses and damnations it gave such a keen foretaile. People ate and drank and mated, basked in the sun and grew solemn under the stars; but there was little meaning in tfrfa immediate stale: whatever significance the items of daily life hud
. „. -i ae.ess.uie- and costumes and rehearsals for the dram* of Man's pilgrimage through eternity. How far could tlie mind go in scientific mensuration and observation as long as ihe mystic mim-1" I s liner? and four and seven and nine and twelve filled every relation with an allegorical significance. Before the sequence* in nature could be studied. ,t was necessary to discipline the imagination and sharpen the i isiont mystic second sight must lie converted into factual
TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
30
hral sight. The artists had a fuller part in this discipline titan they have usually been credited with. In enumerating the many parts (Jf nature that cannot be studied without liie "aid and intervening of mathematics," Francis Bacon properly includes perspective, music, architecture, and engineering along with the sciences- of astronomy and cosmography.
The change in attitude toward nature manifested itself in solitary figures long before it became common. Roger Bacon's e\perimental precepts and his special re-earches in optics have long been commonplace knowledge; indeed, like the scientific vision of his Elizabethan namesake they have been somewhat overrated: llieir significance lies in the fact that they represented a general trend. In die thirteenth Century, the pupils of Albertus Magnus were led by a new curiosity to explore their environment, while Absalon of St. Victor complained that the students wished to study "the conformation of the globe, the nature of the elements, the place of the stars, the nature of animals, the viulence of the wind, the life of herbs and roots." Dante and Petrarch, unlike most medieval men, no longer avoided mountains as mere terrifying obstacles that increased the hardships of travel: they sought them and climbed them, for the exaltation that comes from the conquest of distance and the attainment of a bird's-eye view. Later, Leonardo explored the hills of Tuscany, discovered fossils, made correct interpretations of the processes of geology: Agricola, urged on by his interest in mining, did the same. The herbal = and treatises on natural history that came out during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though they still mingled fable and conjecture with fact, were resolute steps towurd the delineation of nature: their admirable pictures still witness this. And the little books on the seasons and the routine of daily life moved in the same direction. The great painters were not far behind. The Sistine Chapel, no less than Rembrandt's famous picture, was an anatomy lesson, and Leonardo was a worthy predecessor to Vesalius, whose life overlapped bis. In the sixteenth century, according In Beckmann, there were numerous private natural history collections, and in 1659 Elias Ashmole purchased the Tradescant collection, which he later presented to Oxford.
cultural preparation m
The discovery of nature as a whole was the most important part of that era of discovery which began for the Western World with the Crusades and the travels of Marco Polo and the southward ventures of the Portuguese. Nature existed to he explored, to be invaded, to be conquered, and finally, to be understood. Dissolving, the medieval dream disclosed the world of nature, as a lifting min opens to view the rocks and trees and herds on a hillside, whose existence had been heralded only by the occasional tinkling of bells or the lowing of a cow. Unfortunately, the medieval habit of separating the soul of man from the life of the material world persisted, though the theology that supported it was weakened; for as soon as the procedure of exploration was definitely outlined in the philosophy and mechanics of the seventeenth century man himself was excluded from the picture. Technics perhaps temporarily profited by this exclusion; but in the long run die result was to prove unfortunate. In attempting to seize power man tended to reduce himself to an abstraction, or, what comes to almost the same thing, to eliminate every part of himself except that which was bent on seizing power.
6: The Obstacle of Animism
The great series of technical improvements that began to crystallize around the sixteenth century rested on a dissociation of the animate and the mechanical. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in the way of this dissociation was the persistence of inveterate hahittOj animistic thinking. Despite animism, such dissociations had moeed been made in the past: one of the greatest of such acts was the invention of the wheel. Even in the relatively advanced crnhsaUoil of die Assyrians one sees representations of great statues knag moved across bare ground on a sledge. Doubtless the notion of the wfceel came originally from observing that rolling » Jog was shoving it: but trees existed for untold years and the ^»«*" trees had gone on for many thousimds, in all neolithic inventor performed the stunning ad of dissocuuon made possible the cart
So long as every object, animate or *"J^t as the dwelling place of a spirit, »long as one expected a neo
direction, into gfeai'pUuiiers'Weie tun mi ocm
I
TECHNICS AND aVIMZATION
ship I" behave like a living creature, if was msi in impossible ui isolate as a mechanical sequence the special function one nought to serve. Just as the Egyptian workman, when be made the leg „r fl chair, fashioned it to represent the leg ot a bullock, so the desire na'ively to reproduce the organic, and to conjure up giants and djinia for power, instead of contriving their abstract equivalent, retarded the development of the machine. Nature often assists in such ahstrac.. lion: die swan's use of it- wing may have suggested the sail, ,.u.n a* the hornet's not suggested paper. Conversely, the body itself i, a sort of microcosm of the machine: the arms a),  levers, the lungs arc bellows, the eyes are lenses, the heart i- a pump, the iUi is a hammer, the nerves are a telegraph system connected with a central sidtion: bui on the whole, the mechanical instruments were invented before the physiological functions were accurately described. The most ineffective kind of machine is ihe realistic mechanical imitation of a man or another animal: technics remembers Vaucanson for his loom, rather tli.ui hn hi- life-like nieihanic.il duck, which not merely ate food hul went through ihe routine oi digestion and excretion.
The. original advances in modern teclinics became possible only when a mechanical ^yMcm cmild be isolated fiiitn the entire tissue of relations. Not merely did the first airplane, like that of Leonardo, attempt to reproduce the motion of birds' wings: as late as 1897 Ader's hallike airplane, which dqw hangs in the Conservatoire des Ail- el Metiers in Paris had its ribs fashioned like a bat's body, and ihe verv propellers, as if to exhaust all the zoological possibilities, were made of thin, split wood, as much as possible like buds' feather-;. .Similarly, ihe belief that reciprocating motion, as in the movement of the arms and legs. u,i- the ''natural"' form of motion was used to justify opposition lo ihe original conception of the turbine. Branca'* plan of a steam-engine, at the beginning of ihe seventeenth century showed the boiler in ihe form of the bead and torso of a man. Circular motion, one of the niosi useful and frequent attributes of a fully developed machine is, curiously, one of the least observable motions in nature: even ihe stars do not describe a circular course, and except for ibe rotifers, man himself, in occasional dunces and handsprings, is die chief exponent of rotary motion.
33
CULTURAL PKRPAIIATT0N The specific triumph of the technical imagination tested on the ability to dissociate biting power [ruin the arm ami rrcate a crane: to dissociate work from the anion oi men and animals and create the water-mill: to dissociate light from the cnmhiisiion of wood and nil and create tho electric lamp. I-'oi thousands el years animism had rtood in the way of this development; for it had concealed the entire fine of nature behind a scrawl ol human forms: even die star* Mere grouped together in the living figures of Castor and Pollux or ihe Bull on the faintest points of resemblance. Life, not content with its own province, hail flowed incontinently into -t«>ne-, rivers, start, and all the natural ■ laments: the external environment, because ii Nva* so iuunedi.il-h pait ui man, remained capricious, mischievuus. ■ reflection of his own disordered urges and fears.
Since tli- v.-..r!d seemed, in essence, animistic, and since these "external" powers threatened man, the only method of escape that his own Wili-to-power could follow was either the discipline ol ihe self or the ionijiic'-t ni oilier men: the way oi religion nv the way of war. 1 shall discuss, in another place, the special contribution that the technique and animus ot warfare made lo the development of the nun bine; as for the discipline of the personality it was esscn-tiatly. during the Middle Ages, the province of the Church, and it hod gone farthest, of course, not among the pca*anl> and nobles, still clinging to essentially pagan ways of thought, with which the Church bad . ipediemly coraprmnlsed: it had gone laruW in the iti<in.i-1, i iCS and (be universities.
M„e auum-rn was extruded by a sense of the omnipotence of a .ingle spun, .efined, by the very enlargement of Hn duties, out ol a«v semblance of merely human or animal capacities. Cod hao crea.cd an orderly world, and his Law prevailed perhaps inscrutable; but they were nut capricious: the-whole burden of the religion* Uf. was to create an auitude of humility toward the ways of Cod and the world he had created. If the*****<«* of the Middle Age, remained superstitious and anrmume. physical doctrines of the Schoolmen were in fact gist of the matter was thai God's world was not vM «* U£ onlv the church could form a bridge between man and the.b«M*
H TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
The meaning of this division did not fully become apparent until the Schoolmen themselves had fallen into disrepute and rheir in. heritors, like Descartes, had begun to take advantage of the old breach by describing on a purely mechanical bash the entire wurld of nature—leaving out only the Church's special province, the soul of man. It was by reason of the Church's belief in an orderly independent world, as Whitehead has shown in Science and the Modern World, that the work of science could go on so confidently. The humanists of the sixteenth century might frequently be sceptics and atheists, scandalously mocking the Church even when they remained within its fold: it is perhaps no accident thai the serious scientist! of the seventeenth century, like Galileo. Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Pascal, weie. so uniformly devout men. The next step in development, partly made by Descartes himself, was. the transfer of order from God to the Machine. For God became in the eighteenth century the Eternal Clorkmaker who, having conceived and created ami wound up the clock of the universe, had no further responsibility until the machine ultimately broke up—or, as the nineteenth century thought, until the works ran down.
The method of science and technology, in their developed forms, implies a sterilization of the self, an elimination, as far as possible, of die human bias and preference, including the human pleasure in man's own image and the instinctive belief in the immediate presentations of his fantasies. What better preparation could a whole culture have for such an effort than die spread of the monastic system and the multiplication of a host of separate communities, dedicated to the living of a humble and self-abnegating life, under a strict rule? Here, in the monastery, was a relatively noii-animisii*-, non-organic world: the temptations of the body were minimized in theory and, despite strain and irregularity, often minimized in practice—more often, at all events, dian in secular life. The effort to exalt the individual self was suspended in the collective routine,
Like 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 Js and disciplined and focussed the masculine will-to-power: a buc 58HHOD oi military leaders rnmc from the religious orders, while the leader of the order that exemplified the ideals of the Coiinicr-HVfnr-niation began his life as a soldier. One of the first experimental M-ientist-, Roger Bacon, was a monk; so, again. *a, Michael Stifel, who in 1541 widened the use of symbols in algebraic equations; die monk-, stood high in the roll of mechanics and inventors, The »|iiritual routine of the monastery, if it did not positively favor the msehihe, at least nullified many of the influem tes thai worked against it. And unlike the similar discipline of the Buddhist*, dial id tin western monk.- gave i isfl lo more ferule and complex kinds oi machinery ilian prayer wheel-.
In still another way did the institutions of the Church perhaps prepare the way for die machine: in their contempt fur the body. Now rcr-peet for the body and its organs is deep in all the classic cultures of the past. Sometimes, in being imaginatively projected, the body tnaj be displaced symbolically by the pari- or ..rgntis uf another animal, as in the Egyptian Horns: but the substitution is made for lb.- -Ac of intensifying some organic quality, the power of muscle, eye. genitals. The phalluses that Were curried in a religious prat.....sion were greater and more powerful, by representation, than the actual human organ-: s„. too, the images of the pod- might attain hi roic size, to accentuate their vitality. The whole ritual of life in the old cultures tended to emphasize respect for the body and to dwell on its beauties and delights: even the monk- who Pointed the Aianta caves of India were under its spell. The enthronement of the human form in sculpture, and the care of the body ,n ^ palestra of the Greeks or the baths of the Roman-, r»-.-ulnrcrd tins inn.-, feeling for the organic.   The legend about: typifiw ,!„. horror and the resentment that classic people felt against the mutil Hum ol the body: one made bed, to fit human hemes, one did not - bop oil legs 01 heads CO fit beds.
This :,ih.,mai,ve sense «>f the body surely never disappearedeven during the severest triumph, of 0.1 —nity: every new recover* it Lhrough their physical delight in-^ the prevalence of gluttony as R A during the Middle Age* wa
IsěTjTvas^úToéaiiíeTnn
in; UN ITS AND l LV1LIZATI0N
3d
,VI|„,.,. w the importance of the belly. Bui thi systematic tcucjuaj, ,,|- (he Church wen- directed against the bod) and it* culture: ii ,m one band it was ■ Temple oi the Holj Ghost, il was nUn vile sinful by nature: the flesh tended to corrupt inn, and to achieve the pious ends of life one must mortify it and subdue it, lessening iis appetite- by fasting and abstention. Stich was the lettei .,l ole Chaitch'a teaching; and while one cannol suppose that the mats uf humanity kepi close to the letter, ilu feeling against the body's exposure, il- Uses, its celebration, was there.
While public bath hen— were common in the Vliddle Ages, con, trarv to the complacent superstition that developed after the Renas. rence abaiuloiied them, those who were trul) holj neglected to bathe the body; tin-v chafed their .-kin in hair -hill-, they "lopped them-wises, ihcv turned their eyes with charitable interesl upon the snre
.1 ml leprous and deformed. Mating the body, ih.....-thodox minds of
the Middle Ages were prepared to do il violence. Instead of resenting tlie machines that could counterfeit this or that action of the bnilv, ibev emild welcome them. The forms of the machine were jiu mure ugly or repulsive than the bodies of crippled and l> ittered ntojj and women, nr. it lie v were repul-ive and ugly, they «vi re that much iunlici Irum being a temptation to (he flesh. The writer in the IV lira berg Chronicle in might sac that "wheeled engines per-
forming strange task* and shows ami follies come directly from the devil"—hut m spit.. (lf itself, die Chimb was creating devil's disciples.
The (aot is, at all events, that the machine cime most slowly into igrii iiliuie, with its life-conserving, life-maintaining functions, while il prospered lustily pieci-eK in those pail. of I be environment wh«M
the body iva- .....,i infamously treated by custom: namely, in the
monastery, in the mine, on ihe battlefield.
7: Tlie Road Through Magic
Between fantasy and exact knowledge, hetween drama and technology, there i, an intermcdiali- stulion: ibal of magic. Il was in magic that the general conquest of ihe external .-uviioiimeiil was decisively in-tinned. Without ihe ordei ibal ihe Hum I, provided
3J
GUI 11 RAt Mh»\B \t10n
the campaign would possibly have 1......i unthinkable; but without uV
wjld, sriauibbil dai nig of the magicians the III-I posrtiODj wm.ihl jgfi
I,,,, bean taken Fni the magicians not onlj believed in tnarvalshtrt Budaciously Bought to work them: bj thru -u.,inh,g nher ihe excep. lional. die natural philosophers who followed them were first given a clue u> the regular.
The dream "I cnmpiei iug nature is one of the oldest thai has flowed and ebbed in mun'smind. Each ui-at i-pueh in human history in which tin- « dl bi- found a positive outlet murks a rise in human culture and a permanent contribution In man's security and well-being. Prometheus, tin- !ir--bi ingcr. stands at the beginning of man's conquest: foi fire not merely made possible the easier digestion of foods, bul its flames kept off predatory animals, and around ihe warmth of it. during the coldei seasons of the year, an KthJS mcial life became possible, beyond the mere huddle and vacuity □( iIk winter'- -leep. lite slow advam rs in making tools and weapons ami
utensils dial lu.itkeil il......irli<-t 'tone period* weie a pedestrian
conquest ol tin environment: gains by inches. In the neolithic period came the firsl great lilt, with the domestication ol plants and animaU. the making of orderly and effective a-tiom.mical ob-etva linns, ami the -pic.id .it i ii-l.ilively peaceful big-slnne civilization in many lands separated over the planet. Fire-making, agriculture, pottery, Bstronomj were marvi Uous collective leaps: dominations raiharnwii adaptations. For thousands ol years m.-n must Itave dreamed, vainly, of furlIi* r short-CUtS and controls.
Beyond the great and perhaps relatively short period ol neolnT* invention the advances, up to the tenth century of our own en, had been relatively small except in the use of metal-. But the hope of some largei conquest, some more fundamental reversal of maw* dependent relation upon a merciless and indifferent evtemal worh caminiied ... haunt his dream* and eve, his prayers: H.n myth* and fair) -ton, are a testimony to his desire for plenitude and power, for frc, .him of tnnvemeill Uiul length of dav*.
looking at the bird, i......beamed of High.: perhaps one of he
,.....I universal ol man's envies and desires: Puedalus among lW
(neks. Avar Katsi, the flying man, among ihe Penman Indian*, to
.« TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
say nothing of Kali and Neith. Astaite and Psyche, or the Angels of Um-iiiinitv. 'In the thirteenth century, tins dream reappear piopbelirally in the mind of Rogei Damn. The flying carpet of the Arabian Night*, the -cw.-ii-lcigtied boots, the wishing linp. were all evidences of the desire to fly. to travel test, to diminish space, t(j remove the ob-t.icl. of distance. Along with tin- Went a fairly ,.Dn. slant de-i)e to deliver tbc body from n- infirmities, from its eurly Bgingi who h dries up Its power*, and trom Lac diseases that threaten life even in the midst of vigor anil yonih. The god- may be defined as In tags of sLiinr'wli.it more than human stature that have these pnutí- of defying space and Lime and the Cycle ol growth and decay: even in the Christian legem! ihe abilitj to make the lame walk and the blind see is one of the proofs ol godhood. lmhotep and Aesculapius, by reason "I then -kill in the medical arts, were raised inlo deities by the Egyptians and the Greek.-, Oppressed by want and starvation, the dream of the horn of plenty and the Earthly Paradi-e continued to haunt rum.
It wa- in the North lliat these myths of extended powers took on an added uinnie-s, perhaps, from the actual achievements of the miners and smiths: one remembers Thor, master of the tliundor, whose magic hammer made him so putmi: one remembers Load, the cunning and mischievous pod ol fire: one rcmemhci - the gunnies who < reated the magic armor and weapons of Siegfried—llinaiinen of the Finns, who made a steel eagle, and Wiclaml, the lubnhni- German smith, who made feather clothe-, for flight. Hack of all these fables, these collective wishes and Utopias, lay the dc-nc to prevail oyer the brute nature of thing-.
But the very dreams that exhibited thee d. -ne« were a revelation of the dilhcnliy of achieving them. The dream give- direction to human activity and both expresses the innei urge of the organism and conjures up appropriate goal-, I'tul when ihe dream strides too far ahead of fact, it tends to sliort-nn■mt action: the anticipatory subjective pleasure serves as a surrogate tor the thought and contrivance and action that might give it a foothold in reality. The disembodied desire, unconnected with the conditions of its fulfillment OX widi its means of expression, leads nowhere: al most it contributes
CULTURAL PREPARATION M
to an inner equilibrium. How difficult was the discipline rcquhed before mechanical invention became possible one sees in the part played by magte in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Magic, like pure fantasy, was a short cut to knowledge and power. But even in the roost primitive form of shamanism, magic involves a drama and an in lion: if one wishes to kill one's enemy by ntagjc, one most at least mould a wax figure and stick pins into it; and similarly, if the need toi gold in early capitali-m promoted a grand quest for the means of Iran-muling ba-c metals into noble ones, it was accompanied by fumbling and frantic attempts to manipulate the external environment. Under magic, ihe experimental acknowledged that it was necessary to base a sow'- car before one could make a silk pur-e: tins wa- .1 real advance toward matter-of-fact, "The operations," as Lynn Thomdike well -ays of magie, "were supposed to be ellicacion- here in ihe world of external reality"': magic presupposed a public dcnion-tralioii radier dian a merely private guti-fication.
No one can put his linger on the place when- magic hecamc science, where empirici-m became systematic expelimentalism, where alchemy becaroi chemistry, where astrology became astronomy, in short, where ihe need for immediate human result, and gratifications ceased to h-ase it- smudgy imprint. Magic was marked above all perhaps by two unsi ientific qualities: by secrets and mystifications and bj a certain impatience for "results." According to Agm'ola ihe transrautationists of the sixteenth century did not hesitate to conceal gold in a pellet of ore, in order u> make their experiment came out suecessfullj similai dodge-, like a concealed .lock-winder, wens used in the numerous perpetual motion machines that were put forward Everywhere ihe dross 0f fraud and charlatanism mingled with ihe occasional grams ol scientific knowledge that magic milked
or produced . ,
But the instruments of research were developed before a method of procedure was found: and if gold did not come out of lead in
the experiment*
of the alchemists, lltey arc not 10 I* reproached lot their ineptitude hut congratulated on their audacity: dieir imagine-lions smiled quarry in a cave d.ey could not penetrate, and
umnn bHiviIv :i!t(i iioth exUJľŕS*és tlie ífirľfíŕ Uŕfííf Ul  llir Olfcujiic
f\T   I 11 • n ll n l i f
40
technics AND CIVILIZATION
having anJ point"* 6«*% <:dW lhl" huflte" 10 l'" S,l'»'g
,,,,,„. impo.,ant than gold came out of the reaches of the al,llcm. isis* the retort and tlie furnaee and the a].-ml.i<■: the habit of maiiipu-lalinn by crushing, grinding, firing, distilling. dissolving- valuable apparatus for real experiments, valuabh- methods fftT real science, fhe source of authority tor the magician-, ceased to be Aristotle and the Fathers of the Church: they relied upon what their band, could do and their eves could sec. with the aid oi mortal and pestle and furnace. Magic rested on demonstration rather than dialectic: more than anything else, perhaps, except painting, it released European thought from the tyranny of the written text.
In sum, magic turned men's minds to the external world: it suggested the need of manipulating it: it helped create the tools for successfully achieving this, and it sharpened observation as to the results. The philosopher's stone was not found, but the science of chemistry emerged, to enrich us far beyond the simple dreams of the gold-seekers. The herbalist, zealous in his quest for simples and cure-alls, led the way for the intensive explorations of the botanist and the physician: despite our boasts of accurate coal lar drugs, one must not forget that one of the few genuine specifics in medicine, quinine, comes from the cinchona bark, and that chnulmnogra oil, used with success in treating leprosy, likewise com' - from an exotic tree. As children's play anticipates crudely adult Life, so did magic anticipate modern science and technology: it was chief)] the lack of direction dial was fantastic: the difficulty was not in using the 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 ||„. technique which has given us EhrlicVs salvarsan or Bayer 207. But magh was the bridge that united fantasy with technology: the dream of power with the engines of fulfillment. The subjective confidence of the magicians, seeking to inflate their private egos with b.....idless wealth and mysterious energies, surmounted even their practical failures: their fiery hopes, their crazy dreams, their cracker! homunculi continued
i I l.Tl K \ L PREPARATION « to gleam in the ashes: to base dreamed so riotously was to make die
technics that followed less Incredible and hence less impossible, ft: Social Regimentation
II meenauiea] thinking and ingenious experiment produced die machine, regimentation gave it u soil to grow in: the social process
worked li.....I iii hand with the new iileulopy and tine new technics,
Long before tlie peoples of the ^ estem World turned to the machine, mediani-in a- an element in social life had come into cxi-lciiee. Before inventors created engines to take the place of men. the leaders of men had drilled and regimented multitudes of human beings: they had discovered how to reduce men to machines. The slaves and peasants who hauled the stones for the pyramids, pulling in rhythm to the crack of the whip, the -laves working in the Roman galley, each man chained to his seat and unable to perform any other motion than the limited mechanical one, the order and march and system of attack of the Macedonian phalanx—these were all machine phenomena. Whatever limits the actions and movements of human beings to their bare mechanical elements belongs to the physiology, if not to the mechanics, of the machine age.
From the fifteenth century on invention and regimentation worked reciprocally. The increase 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 to moie subtle and complex organic farts: by the seventeenth century tin- turn of interest disclosed il-elf in philosophy. Descartes, in aiuilv/ing the physiology of the human body, remarks that its fune-tioniug apart fiom the guidance of the will does not "appear at all strange In 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 but a few pieces compared with the great multitude of Unties, nerves, arteries, veins, and other parts that are found in the body of each animal. Such persons will look upon this body as a machine made by the hand of God." But the opposite process was also true: the mechanisation of human habits prepared the way for mechanical imitations.
i   i _ t___
4* technics and civilization
To ihe degree that fear and disruption prevail in BOCfftty, men tend to seek an absolute: it it does not exist, they project it. Regimentation gave lite men of the period a finality they could discover nowhere else. If one of the phenomena of the breakdown of the medieval order was the turbulence that made men freebooters, discoverers, pioneers, breaking away from the lameness of the old ways and the rigor of self-imposed discipline*, the other phenomenon, related to it, but compulsively drawing society into a regimented mould, was the methodical routine of the drillmaster and the book-keeper, the soldier and the bureaucrat. These masters of regimentation gained full ascendency in the seventeenth century. The new bourgeoisie, in counting house and shop, reduced life to a careful, uninterrupted routine: so long for business: so long for dinner: so long for pleasure —all carefully measured out. as methodical as the sexual intercourse of Tristram Shandy's father, which coincided, symbolically, with the monthly winding of the clock. Timed payments: timed contracts: limed work: timed meals: from thi> period on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or tlie 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 the Economic Man. Robinson Crusoe was all the more representalive as a tale not only because it was the work of one of the new breed of writers, the professional journalists, but because it combines in a single setting the element of catastrophe and adventure with the necessity for invention. In the new economic system every man was for himself. The dominant virtues were thrift, foresight, skillful adaptation of means. Invention took the place of image-making and ritual; experiment took the place of contemplation; demonstration took the place of deductive logic and authority. Even ulone on a desert island the sober middle class virtues would carry one through. . . •
Protestantism re-enforced these lessons of middle class sobriety and gave them Cod's sanction. True: the main devices of finance
i
cultural prepab ation a were a product of Catholic Europe, and Protestantism has received undeserved praise as a liberating force from medieval routine and undeserved censure as the original source and spiritual justification of modern capitalism. Hut the peculiar office of Protestantism was to unite finance to 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 anil 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 elaborate ritual: it was to be found in the word itself*, the word without its communal background. In the last analysis, the individual must fend for himself in heaven, as he did on the exchange. The expression of collective beliefs through the arts was a snare: so the Protestant stripped the images from his Cathedral and left the hare 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 ii! Space was real: conquer it! Matter was real: measure it! These were the realities and the imperatives of trie middle class philosophy. Apart from the surviving scheme of divine salvation all its impulses were already put under the rule of weight and measure and quantity: day and life were completely regimented. In the eighteenth century Benjamin Franklin, who had perhaps been anticipated by the Jesuits, capped the process by inventing a system of moral book-keeping.
How was it that the power motive became isolated and intensified toward the close of the Middle Ages?
Each element in life forms part of a cultural mesh: one part implicates, restrains, helps to express the other. During this period the mesh was broken, and a fragment escaped and launched itself on a separate career—the will to dominate die environment. To donnV nate, not to cultivate: to seize power, not to achieve form. One cannot, plainly, embrace a complex scries of events in such simple) »*rt»
rlnmmanf virtues were thrift- tnresieht. skiiitui adiiniation
+1 TECHNICS A N D (.. I \ [LIZA (ION
alone, Anothei faciei in the change ra*j have been due to an intensit fied sense oi inft-i ioi itv: this perhaps a lose thimigh lie humiliating disparity between man's ideal pretensions and bis read accomplish-
ments—between the charity and peace preached h\ the Church and lis eternal wars and feud* and animosities, between ihe hol) Life as preached by the saints and the lascivious life a- lived by ihe Renascence Popes, between the belief in heaven and the squalid disordei and
disire-.- of actual existence Failing redemption by grace, barmoniza-funí of desires, the Chiistian viitue-. people sought, perhajis, to wipe out their sense of inferiority and overcome theii frustration by seek* ing power.
At all events, the old synthesis had broken down in thought and in social action. In no little degree, it had broken down because it was an inadequate one: a closed, perhaps fundamentally neurotic com caption of human life and destiny, winch originally bad sprung out of the misery and iciror that had attended both lbe brutality of Imperialistů: Rpnte and its ultimate pulielactiou and decay. So remote were the attitudes and concepts ol Christianity from the facts of the natural world and of human life, thai once (he world it-elf wa« opened up by navigation ami exploration, by tie- new cosmology, by new methods of observation anil experiment, there "a- no returning to the broken shell of the nbj order. The šplh between the Heavenly system and the Earthly one bad become too grave to be overlooked, too wide to be bridged: human life had 8 destiny out--jde thai shell. The crudest science touched closer to contemporary truth than the most refined sdmla-fici-m: the clumsiest -team engine or spuming jenny had more efficiency than the soundest guild regulation, and lbe paltriest factory and iron bridge bad more promise for architecture than the most masterly buildings of Wren and Adam; the Etrst yard of cloth woven by machine, the firs! plam iron casting, had potentially more esthetic interest than jewelry fa-hioned by a Cellini or the canvas covered by a Reynolds, in short! a live machine was belter than a dead organism; md the organi-m of medieval culture was dead.
From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth men lived in an empty world: a world that was daily growing emptier, 'I bey B»io
CULTURAL PREPARATION « their prayers, they repeated iheir bruvnUa; ihey even sought to retTieve  ll>e  holiness they  hud lost by  resurrecting superstitions
thev had long abandoned: hence the fierceness and hollow fanaticism of the Counter-Reformation, it- burning of heretics, its persecution of will hes, precisely in the midst of the growing "enlightenment," They threw thenis. I\baek irilo the medieval dream with a new intensity al feeling, il not conviction: they carved and painted and wro|.---who indeed ever bewed mole mightily in -lone llwu Michelangelo, who wiole with nioie spectacular ecstasy and vigor than Shakespeare? But beneath the -Ullaee occupied by these works of
ail and ihought was a dead World, an empty world, a void that no amount of da-h and bravura could fill up. The arls shot up into the air in a hundred pul-ing fountains, for it i- jn-i al the moment of cultural and social dissolution that the mind oflen works with a freedom and inlcn-il1. that i- not possible when the social pattern is stable and life a- a whole is more satisfactory: but the idolum itself had become empty.
Men no longer believed, without practical reservations, in heaven and bell and the communion of the saints: sldl less did they believe in the smooth cods and goddesses arid sylph* and muses whom they used, with elegant but meaningless gestures, to adorn their thoughts and embellish theii environment: these supernatural figures, though they were human in oiigin and in consonance with certain stable human needs, had become wrailhs. Observe the infant Je-ua of a ltt.iit.. nib century allarpiece: the infant lies on an nltaT. opart; the Virgin is transfixed and beatified by the presence of the Holy Ghost: the myth is real. Observe the Holy Families >d the sixteenth and seventeenth century painting: fashionable young ladies are coddling their well-fed human infants: the myth has died. First only the gon.'.-oiis clothes are left: finally n doll takes the place of the living child: a mechanical puppet- Mechanics became the new religion, and il gave lo the world a new Mesaiflh; the machine.
«>: The Mechanical Universe
The issues of practical life found iheir justification and their appropriate frame of ideas in the nutural 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 ha* been challenged, modified, amplified, and in part undermined by the further pursuit of science itself. A series of thinkers, Bacon, Descartes. Galileo, Newton. Puscal, defined the province of science, elaborated its special technique of research, and demonstrated its emcacy,
At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were only scat1 teied efforts of thought, some scholastic, some Aristotelian, tone mathematical and scientific, as in the astronomical observations of Copernicus. Tycho Brahe. and Kepler: the machine had had only an incidental part to play in these intellectual advances. At the end, despite the relative sterility of invention itself during this century, there existed a fully articulated philosophy of the universe, on purely mechanical lines, which served as a starling point for all the physical sciences and for further technical improvements: the mechanical Wehbiid had come into existence. Mechanics set the pattern of successful research and shrewd application. Up 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 I860 that biological facts were recognized as an important basis for technics.
By what means was the new mechanical picture put together? And how did it come to provide such an excellent -oil for the propagation of inventions and the spread of machines?
The method of the physical sciences rested fundamentally upon a few simple principles. First: the elimination of qualities, and the reduction of the complex to the simple by paying attention only to those aspects of events which could be weighed, measured, or counted, and to the particular kind of space-lime sequence that could be controlled anil repeated—or, as in astronomy, whose repetition could be predicted. Second: concentration upon the outer world, and the elimination or neutralization of the observer as respects the data with which be works. Third: isolation; limitation of the field: specialization of interest and subdivision nf labor. In short, what the physical sciences call the world is not the total object of common human experience: it is just those aspects of this experience
CULTURAL PREPARATION
dial lend themselves to accurate factual observation and to Be„. eralized statements. One may define a mechanical system ai one in which any random sample of ihe whole will serve in place of the whole: an ounce of pure water in the laboratory is supposed to have the same properties as a hundred cubic feet of equally pure water in the cistern and the environment of die object is not supposed to affect its behavior. Our modern concepts of space and time make it seem doubtful if any pure mechanical system really exiita: but the original bias of natural philosophy was to discard organic complexes and to seek i-olutc which could be described, for praili-ml purposes, as if they completely represented the "physical world" from which they had been extracted.
This elimination of the organic had the justification not only of practical inteiesi but of history itself. Whereas Socrates had turned hi- back upon die Ionian philo'ophei* because he was more concerned to learn about man'- dilemmas than to learn about trees, rivers, and stars, .ill that could be oiled positive knowledge, which hud survived the rise and fall of human societies, were just such non-vital truths a- the Pythagorean theorem. In contrast to the cycles of tasie, doctrine, fashion, there had been a steady accretion of mathematical and physical knowledge. In this development, the study of setrooomj had been a great aid: the stars could noi he cajoled or perverted: then courses were visible to the naked eye and could be followed by any patient observer.
Compare 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 die varying rale of speed and the changes of position that takes place in the nearer and more familial object. T„ fw attention upon a mechanical ivilem wu the fint ttep totvard creating system: an important victory for rational thought By centering effort upon lite non-historic and the inorganic, the physical sciences clarified the eniire procedure of analysis: for the field to which they confined their attention was one in which the method could be pushed farthest without being too palpably inade* quale or encountering too many special difficulties. But the wA physical world was still not simple enough for the scientific m^M
48 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
in iis first stages of development: it was necessary to reduce it to such elements as could be ordered in terms oi space, time, mass, motion, quantity. The amount of elimination and rejection that accompanied this was excellently described by t.alileo. who gave the process such a strong impetus. One must quote him in full:
"As soon as I form I conception of a material or Corporeal substance, I sirnultaneously feel the necessity of Conceiving lh.il it lias boundaries of some shape or other; that relatively to others it is great or small; that it is in this or that pi ice, in this or thai 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 act of imagination, disjoin it from these qualities. Hut 1 do not find myself absolutely compelled to apprehend it .is iice^ai ily accompanied by f-uch conditions us that it musl be while or red. bitter or sweet, sonorous or silent, smelling sweetly ot disagreeably; and if the senses had tiot pointed out these qualities language and imagination alone could never have arrived at tbeiu. Therefore I think that these tastes, smells, color-, eh., with regaid to the ..bjeel in which they appear to reside, are nothing more than mere names. They exi.-i only in the sensitive body, for when the living creature is removed all these qualities are earned ,.!! and annihilated, although we have imposed pjrticui.ii names upon them, and would fain persuade ourselves that they truly and in f:o-t e>.i-t. I d'< not believe that there exists anything in externa] bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, etc., except ■,[■/,■■, shape, quantity, and motion."
In other words, physical science confined itself to the so-called primary qualities: the 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 wan highly important for survival: more so, perhaps, than the ability f" 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 terms of mathematical
CULTURAL PREPARATION ,w analysis, because they bad. as an ultimate point of reference, an independent measuring stick for time and space, a clock, a ruler, a
balance.
The value of concent rating iipun primary qualities was that it neutralised hi experiment mid analysis the sensory and emotional jracti..n.; of the observer: apart from die process of thinking, he
became an instrument of record. In this manner, scientific technique became communal, impersonal, objective, within its. limited bald, the purely couvoilvmaJ "material world." This technique resulted in a valuable moralization ol thought: the standards, first worked out in realms foreign to man's personal aims and immediate interests, were equally applicable to more complex aspeiIs of reality that stood closer to his hopes, loves, ambitions. Rut the first effect of this advance in clarity and in sobriety of thought was in devaluate every departmem oi experieni e except that which lent itself to mathematical investigation. When the Royal Society was founded in England, the humanities were deliberately excluded.
In general, the practice of the physical sciences meant an intensification of the senses: the eye had never before been so sharp, the ear so kern, die hand so accurate. Ilooke, who had seen how'glasses improved seeing, doubted not that "'there may be found Mechanical Invention- to improve our other senses, of hearing, smelling, lasting, touching." Bui with this gain in accuracy, went a deformation of experieni e as a whole. The instruments of science were helpless in the realm of qualities. The qualitative was reduced to the subjective: the sub jo hi!' was dismissed as unreal, and the unseen and immeasurable noil existent. Intuition and feeling did not affect mechanical process or mechanical explanations. Much could be accomplished by the new science and the new technics because much that was associated with life and work in the past—art, poetry, organic rhythm, fantasy—was deliberately eliminaled. 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 specialuation in single parts of an operation, which already had begun lo characterize the economic life of the seventeenth century, prevailed in the world of thought:
Ate
tmindtft d
JS8
50 technics and civilization
they were expressions of the same desire for mechanical accuracv and for quick results. The field of research was progressively divided up, and small parts of it were suhject to intensive examination: in small measures, so to say, truth might perfect he. This restriction was a great practical device. To know the complete nature of an object does not necessarily make one fit to work with it: for complete knowledge requires a plenitude of time: moreover, it tends finally to a sort of identification which lacks precisely the cool aloofness that enables one to handle it and manipulate il for external ends. If one wishes to eat a chicken, one had better treat it as food from i he beginning, and not give it too much friendly attention or human sympathy or even esthetic appreciation: if one treats the life of the chicken as an end. one may even with Brahniinical thoroughness preserve the lice in its feathers as well as the bird. Selectivity is an operation necessarily adopted by die organism to beep it from being overwhelmed with irrelevant sensations and comprehensions. Science gave this inevitable selectivity a new rationale: il singled out the most negotiable set of relations, mass, weight, number, motion.
Unfortunately, isolation ond abstraction, while important to orderly research and refined symbolic representation, are likewise conditions under which real organisms die, ur at least cease to function effectively. The rejection of experience in its original whole, besides abolishing images and disparaging the non-instrumental aspects of thought, had another grave result: on the positive side, it was a belief in the dead; for the vital processes often escape close observation so long as the organism is alive. In short, the accuracy and simplicity of science, though they were responsible for its colossal practical achievements, were not an approach to objective reality but a departure from it. In their desire to achieve exact results the physical sciences scorned true objectivity: individually, one side of the personality was paralyzed; collectively, one side of experience was ignored. To substitute mechanical or two-way time for history, the dissected corpse for the living body, dismantled units called "individuals" for men-in-groups, or in general the mechanically measurable or reproducible for the inaccessible and the complicated and the organically whore, is to achieve a limited practical mastery
CULTURAL PREPARATION M
at the expense of truth and of the larger efficiency that depends on truth.
By confining his operations to those aspects of reality which hud, so to say. market value, and by isolating and dismembering the corpus of experience, the physical scientist created a habit of mind favorable to discrete practical inventions: at the same time it was highly unfavorable t" all those form* of art for which the secondary qualities and the individualised receptors and motivators of the artist were ol fundamental importance. By his consistent metaphysical
principle- and in-, tactual method of research, the physical scientist denuded the world of natural and organic objects and turned his back upnii reál experience; he substituted for the body and blood of reality s skeleton of effective abstractions which he could manipulate with appropriate wile- and pulleys.
What was left was the bare, depopulated world of matter and motion: a waste! ind. In order to thrive at all, it was necessary for ihe Inheritors of the seventeenth century idolnm to fill the work] up again with new otgam-m-. devised to repre-ent the new realities of phvsieal science. Machines—and machines alone—completely met the requirements of the new scientific method and point of view: they fulfilled the definition of "reality" far more perfectly than living organisms. And once the mechanical world-pietuie was established, machines could thrive and multiply anil dominate existence: their competitors had been exterminated or had been consigned to a penumbra 1 universe in which only artists and lovers and breeders ot animal-, 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? If science presented un ultimate reality, then the machine was, like the law in Gilbert's ballad, the Hue embodiment of everything that was excellent. Indeed in this empty, denuded world, the invention oi machines became a duty. By renouncing a large 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 of power, but power ripped loose from his flesh and isolated from his humanity.
54 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
in: TV Duty to Invest
The principles thai had proved effective in the development of the scientific method were, with appropriate changes, those that served as a foundation for invention. Technic-; is :i translation into appropriate, practical forms of the theoretic truths, implicit or formulated, anticipated or discovered, of science. Science and technics form two independent yet related worlds: sometimes converging, sometimes drawing apart. Mainly empirical inventions, like the -team-engine, may suggest Cirnoť- researches in thermodynamic-: abstract physical investigation, like Faraday's with the magnetic field, may lead directly to the invention of the dynamo, From the geometry and astronomy of Egypt and Mesopotamia, Imth closely connected with the practice of agriculture to the latest researches in electro-physics, Leonardos dictum holds true: >. ii-uce is the captain ami practice the soldiers. But sometime-- the soldiers win the battle without leadership, and sometimes the captain, by intelligent strategy, obtains victory without actually engaging in battle.
The displacement of the living and the organic took place rapidly with the early development of the machine. For the machine was n counterfeit of nature, nature analyzed, regulated, narrowed, controlled by the mind of men. The ultimate goal of il- development was however not the mere conquest of nature but her 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 envuoument as 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 wa- to technics that he turned for fulfillment. Steam engines displaced horse power, iron and concrete displaced wood, aniline dyes replaced vegetable dyes, and so on down the line, with here and there a gap. Sometimes the new product waB superior practically or esthetically to the old, as in the infinite superiority of the electric lamp over the tallow candle: sometimes the new product remained inferior in quality, as rayon is still inferior to natural silk: bul in either event the gain was in
I  ANTICIPATIONS OF SPEE
1: Rapid land locomotion: the Mil-wagon (1598) u»ed by Prince Maurice ol Orange, one Oi the fust roinmanders to introduce modern drill. The desire for speed, proclaimed by Hiirc' B*Wn. in the thirteenth century, bad lu-aimi insistent by the .ixlrenlh r.m.ir>. H.-nce skates tot .|inrt.
lCourrr<>, OtOUtS*4 ViM.um. l/unr.Arnl
. Múu i ba i
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C t-II-TI KAL PREPARATION 53
the creation oi .111 equivalent product or synthesis which was less dependent upon uncertain organic variations and irregularities in either the product itself or the labor applied to it than was the original.
often the knowledge upon which the displacement was made was insufficient and the result was sometimes disastrous. The history oi the la-t ilmusand years abounds in examples oí apparent mechanical Uld -1 ieiitific triumphs whn h were fundamentally unsound. One need oidv mention bleeding in medicine, the use of common window glass which excluded the important ultra-violet rays, the establish* unlit of thi pORt-Liellig dietary On the basis of mere energy replace-in.-ni. thi am •! the elevated toilet seal, the introduction of steam beat, which dries the air excessively—but the li-t is a long and DOmewhat appalling one. The point is that invention had become a duty, and tiie de-ire to use the new marvels of technics, like a child's delighted bewilderment over new toys, was not in ihe main guided by critical discernment: people agreed Ibal inventions were good, whether or    c they actually provided benefits, just as they agreed that child betting was good, whether the offspring proved a blessing Id society or a nuisance.
Mechanical invention, even more than science, was the answer to a dwindling faith and a faltering life-impulse. The meandering energies of men. which had flowed over into meadow and garden, had crept      • grotto and cavr, during the Renascence, were turned by invention into a confined bead of water above .1 turbine: they could i-paikle and npphr and cool and revive and delight no more: they were harnessed for « narrow and definite purpose: to move wheels and multiply society's capacity for work. To live was to work: what other lift, indeed do machines hiau? Faith had at last found a new object, not the moving of mountains, hut the moving of engines and machines. Power: the application of power to motion, and the application of motion to production, and of production to money-making, and so the further increase of power—this was the worthiest object thai a mechanical habit of mind and a mechanical mode of net ion put before men. As everyone recognizes, a thousand salutary instrument- came out of the new technics, but in origin front the seventeenth century on the machine served as a substitute religion.
SiV***a?
ami so itie lurllier mcreasi
mm
54 technics AND CIVILIZATION
and a vital religion does not need the justification ol mere utility.
The religion of die machine needed such support as little as the transcendental faiths it supplanted; for the mission of religion is to provide an ultimate significance and motive-force: the necessity of invention was a dogma, and the ritual of a mechanical routine was die binding element in tin- faith. In the eighteenth century. Mechanical Societies sprang into existence, to propagate the Dreed with greater zeal: they preached the gospel of work, justification by faith in mechanical science, and sulfation 1>> the machine. Without the missionary enthusiasm of the enterprisers and industrialists and engineers and even the untutored mechanics from the eighteenth century onward, it would be impossible to explain the rush of converts and ihe accelerated tempo of mechanical improvement. The impersonal procedure of science, the hard headed contrivances of mechanics, the rational calculus of the utilitarians—those interests captured emotion, all the more because the golden paradise of financial success lay beyond.
In their compilation of inventions and discoveries, Darmstaedler and Du Bois-Iteymond enumerated the following inventor!,: between 1700 and 1750—170: between 1750 and 1800—344: between 1800 and 1850—861: between 1850 and 1900—1150. Even allowing for the foreshortening brought about automatically by historical perspective, one cannot doubt die increased acceleration between 1700 and 1850. Technics had seized the imagination: ihe engines themselves and the goods they produced both seemed immediately desirable. While much good came through invention, much invention came irrespective of ihe good. If the sanction of utility had been uppermost, invention would have proceeded most rapidly in lite departments where human need was sharpest, in fond, shelter, and clothing: but although the last department undoubtedly advanced, the farm and die common dwelling house were much slower to profit by the new mechanical technology than were die battlefield and ihe mine, while the conversion of gains in energy into a life abundant took place much more slowly after the seventeenth century than it had done during the previous seven hundred years.
Once in existence, the machine tended to justify itself by silently
cultural preparation m
taking over departments of life neglected in its ideology. Virtuosity is on important clement in the development uf technics: the interest in the materials as such, ihe pride of mastery over tools, the skilled manipulation of form. The machine crystalled in new patterns the whole sel <>f independent inlerests which Thorslein Veblen grouped loosely under '"the insiincl of workmaiibhip." and enriched technics as a whole even when it temporarily depleted handicraft. The very sensual and contemplative responses, excluded from love-making and song and fantasy by the concentration upnn the mechanical means of production, were not of course finally excluded from life: they re-entered it in ns^ociation with the technical arts themselves, and the machine, nflen lovingly personified as a living creature, as with Kipling's engineers, absorbed die affection and care of bolh inventor and workman. Cranks, pistons, screws, valves, sinuous motions, pulsations, rhythms, murmuis. 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, bul human and final: it contributed, like any other work of art, to an organic equilibrium. This development of value within the machine complex itself, apart from the value of the products created by it, was, as we shall sec at a lat.i sUcc, a profoundly important result of die new technology.
11: Practical Anticipations
From die beginning, the practical value of science was uppermost in the minds of its exponents, even in those who single-mindedly pursued abstract trudi, and who were as indifferent to ils popularisation as Gauss and Weber, the scientists who invented the telegraph for their private communication. "If my judgment be of any weight," said Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning, "the use of history mechanical is of all others the most radical and fundamental towards natural philosophy: such natural philosophy a* shall not vanish in the fume of subtile, sublime, or delectable speculation, bat such as shall be operative to the endowment and benefit oi marfs life." And Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, observe*: "JW
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i* TECHNICS AND CIVILISATION
them [general rettrietioru rwpeetlng physic*] I perceived ň to be possible to arrive at knowledge highly useful in life) sad in lieu of
(he speculative philosophy usually taught In the schools to di SCO Vet n practical, by means ol'whieh, knowing tlx- force ami a. lion of fire, water, air, tin start, the beAYens, ami all the Other bodies that surround! us, as distantly a? we know the various crafts of our arttaana,
we might also apply them in the same way to all the use- to which they arc adapted, and thus render ourselves the lord- and possessor!, of nature. And this is a result to )»■ desired, OOl only in order to lire invention of an infinity of arts, by which we might be able to enjoy without any trouble the fruits of the earth, .ind all its comforts, but also especially for die preservation of health, which i - without doubt of all blessings of this life the first and fundamental one; for the mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of lire organs of the body thai if any means can ever be found I" render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, 1 believe tliat it is in medicine they must be sought for."
Who is rewarded in the perfect commonwealth devised by Bacon in The New Atlantis? In Salomon's House the philosopher and the urti-t and the teacher were left out of account, even though Bacon, like the prudent De-carte?, clung very ceremoniously |o the rites of the Christian church. For the "ordinances and riles" of Salomon's House there are two galleries. In one of diesc "we place patterns and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inventions: in the other we place the statues of all principal Inventors. There we have the statue of your Columbus, that discovered the West Indies: also the Inventor of Ships: your monk diat was the Inventur of Ordnance and Gunpowder: the Inventor oi Music; the inventor of Letters; the Inventor of Printing! the Inventm of observations by astronomy: the Inventor of Works in Metal: the Inventor of Glass: the Inventor of Silk of the Worm: the Inventor of Wine: the Inventor of Com and Bread: the Inventor of Sugars. ... For upon every invention of value, we erect a statue to the Inventor and give him a liberal and honorable reward." This Solomon's House, as Bacon fancied it, was a combination of the Rockefeller Institute
CULTURAL PHEfARATtON S7 and the Deal-dies Museum: tl tere, if anywhere, was lite means to-wards the relief of marl's estate.
Observe this; there is little that is vague or fanciful in all these conjectured about the new role to he played by science and the ma* hine. The general staff of science had worked out the strategy of the i Snips ign long before the commanders in the field had developed ,i tactics capable of carrying out the attack hi detail. Indeed, Usher notes that in the seventeenth century invention was relatively feeble, and the power of the technical imagination had far outstripped die actual eapmilc - ol workmen and engineers. Leonardo, Alidreae, Campariella, Bacon, Hooke in his Micrographis and Glanvill in hi? Scepi i- Scientifica, wrote down in outline the specifications for
tl„- ii,......I< r: the use of science for the advancement of technics,
and tin- direction ol technics toward die conquest of nature were the burden oi tie- whole effort. Bacon's Salomon's House, though formulated afici the a. lual founding of the Accademia Lynxei in Italy, was the actual starting point of the Philosophical College that first met in 1646 at die Bullhead Tavern in Cheapside, and in 1662 was duly incorporated as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. This society hod eight standing committees, the first of which was to "consider and improve all mechanical inven-tious." The lalioi.ii>! ies and technical museums of the twentieth cen-lurv c i-o d first as a thought in the mind of this philosophical courtier: nothing that we do or practice today would have surprised him.
So confident in the results of die new approach was Hooke that he wrote: "There is nothing that lies within the power of human wil (or whi.h is far more effectual) of human industry which we might nol compass; we might not only hope for inventions to cousin* those of Co per,..cus. Galileo, Gilbert, Harvey, and oUters. Whose name* arc almost lost, that were the inventors of Gunpowder, the Seaman's Compass. Printing, Etching, Graving. Mi^^ ^
but m.,1,.....le? that may far exceed them: (or even those discovered
seem to have been tire product of some such methods feu* bu imperfect: what may no. be therefore expected from it if Jk-jW prosecuted? Talking and contention of Argument* wouU soonta turned n,to labors; all die hue dreams and opnuons and universal
W TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
metaphysical nature, which ihe luxury of subtil brains lias devised nodi 'juickly month and give place to -olid histories, experiments, and work--"
The leading Utopias of the time, Chrislijiiopnlis, tlie City of the Sun, to say nothing of Bacon's fragment or Cyrano de Bergerac's minor works,, all brood upon the possibility of utilising the machine to make the world more perfect: the machine was ihe substitute for Plato's justice, temperance, and courage, even a. it was likewise for the Christian ideals nf grace and redemption. The machine came forth as the new demiurge that was |,> create a new heaven and a new earth: at the least, as a new Muse- thai was to lead a barbarous humanity into ihe promised land
There had been premonitions of all this in the centuries before. "1 will now mention,*1 said Roger Bacon, "some of the wonderful works of art .aid nature in which there is nothing <>f magic and which
magic could not perform, instruments may be made by which the largest .-hips, wilh only one man guiding ihent. will be carried with greater velocity than if ihey were full of Ballots. Chariots mav be constructed that will move wilh incredible rapidity without the help of animals. Instruments of living mav be formed in which a man, sitting at his ease and meditating in anv snhjei t, mav beat the air with his artificial wings alter the manner of birds ... as also machines which will enable men in walk at the bottom of seas or rivers without ship.-." And Leonardo de \ inci lefl 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 jnipiil-e bad become more universal and urgent. The works of Porta. Cardan, Bessou, Ramelli, and odicr ingenious inventors, engineers, and mathematicians are a witness both to increasing skill and to growing enthusiasm over technics itself. Schwenter in bis Delasseuients Phy»ico-Mntb«;inuti<pics (1636) pointed out how two individuals could communicate with each Outer 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
CULTURAL PREPARATION to confer at the distance of the Indies by sympa...,■„. ,„„„,, nIuy be as usual in future times as by literary correspnnd. Cyrano de Bergerae conceived the phonograph. Hooke observed inn it it, "not impossible to hear a whisper a furlong's distance, it having been already done; and perhaps the nature of things would not make it more impossible, although that furlong be ten times multiplied." Indeed, ha even forecast the invention of artificial silk. And Glanvill said again: "] doubt not posterity will find many dungs that are now
some
but rumors serified into practical realities. It may be that, „.....
aces heme, i voyage to the Southern tracts, yea. possibly to the moon, will not be more strange than one to America, . , . The restoration of giev hairs to juvenility and the renewing the exhausted marrow may at length be effected without a miracle; and the turning of the now comparatively desert world into a paradise may not improbably be effected from late agriculture." (1661)
Whatever was lacking in the outlook of Ule seventeenth century it was not lack of faith in the imminent presence, the speedy development, and ihe profound importance of the machine. Clock-making: time-keeping:   space-exploration: monastic  regularity: bourgeois order: technical devices: protectant inhibitions: magical explorations: finally the magistral order, accuracy, and clarity of the physical -• icnee- ibem.-elves—all these separate activities, inconsiderable perhaps in themselves, had at last formed a complex social and ideological network, capable of supporting the vast weight ol the machine and extending its operations still further. By the middle of the eighteenth century the initial preparations were over and the kev inventions bad been made. An army of natural philosophers, rationalists, experimenters, mechanics, ingenious people, had assembled who were clear as lo their goal and confident as to their victory. Before more than a streak of grey had appeared at the horizon's rim, they pi hi la imed the dawn and announced how wonderful it was: bow marvelou- the nev, day would be. Actually, they were to announce ■ shift in the seasons, perhaps a long cyclical change in the dhnate itself.
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