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
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*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 dot's not lessen the importance of the new schemata. The categories Of time and space, once practically dissociated, had hecome uniled: and the abstractions of measured time and measured space undermined the earlier conceplions of infinity and eternity, since measurement must begin with an arbitrary here and now even if space and time he empty. The itch to use space and time had broken out: and once they were co-ordinated with movement, they could be contracted or expanded: the conquest of Space and time had begun. (It is interesting, however, to note that the yetj concept of acceleration, which is part of our daily mechanical experience, was not formulated till the seventeenth century.)
The signs of this conquest are many: they came forth in rapid succession. In military arts the cross-bow and the ballista were re-vived and extended, and on their heels came more powerful weapons for annihilating distance—the cannon and later (lie musk. i. Leonardo conceived an airplane arid built one. Fantastic projects for lliglit were canvassed. In 1120 Fonlana described -i velocipede: in 1589 (Wiles de Bom of Antwerp apparently built .i man-propelled wagon: ie.-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 Ahfi l-Q£sim had attempted Bight, and in 10t>5 Oliver of Malmesbury had killed lum-elf in an attempt to -oar from a high place! but from the fifteenth century on 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 nl i Bight from Portugal to Vienna serve as a news hoax in 1709.
The new Altitude toward time and space infected the workshop and the counting house, the army and the cil\. Hie tempo became faster: the magnitudes became greater: conceptually, modern < ulluxe
launched itself into space, .ind gave itself over to movement. What
Max Weber called llw* "rotn.iniii ism of numbers" grew naturally not of this interest, In timekeeping, in hading, in fighting 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 scientific habits of thought. This trot [be rise
of capitalism, and the change from I barter economy, facilitated by small supplies of variable local coinage, to a money economy with an international credit structure and a constant reference to the abstract symbols of wealth: gold, draft-, 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 w'ars 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, bill- of ex-change, letters of credit, and speculation in "futures" were all developed in essentially their modem form, ^"hereas the procedures of science were not refined ami 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. Picrporil Morgan could in,.If-i 'land each other's methods and point of view and temperament far better than Paracelsus and Einstein.
The development of capitalism brought the new habits of abstraction and calculation into the lives of city people: only the country folk, still existing on their more primitive local basis, were partly immune. Capitalism turned people from tangibles to intangibles: it* symbol, as Sombart observes, is the account bonk: "its life-value lie* in its profit and loss account." The "economy of acquisition," which had hitherto been practiced by rare and fabulous creatures like Midas and Croesus, became once more the everyday mode: it tended to replace the direct "economy of needs" and to substitute raniiey-vahies for life-values. The whole, process of business took on more and more an abstract form; it wag concerned with non-commodiliea, imaginary futures, hypothetical gains.
Karl Marx well summed up this new process of IransnraUtiom-"Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into ft.
thodireci "reonomv o] needs  ami to suusnnne mouir
14
TECHNICS AND c t V I L I / \ T I O N
every tiling, whether a commodity or nut, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and purchasable. Circulation is ilie 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 distinction--. Hut money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of an individual. Thus social power becomes private power in the hands of a private person."
This last fact was particularly important for life and thought: the quest of power by means of abstract ion-. 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 direct U8C 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 to 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, so did the resulting money economy promote more trade: landed wealth, humanized wealth, houses, paintings, sculptures, books, even gold itself were all relatively difficult to transport, tvhereal money could be transported after pronouncing the proper abr.-nadahra by a simple algebraic operation on one side or another of the ledger.
In time, men were more at home with abstractions than they were with die goods they represented. The typical operations of finance were the acquisition or the exchange of magnitudes. "Even the day*
tivetv dJllicult to traiisnort. whereas rnoiiev could be transported attef
CULTURAL HMEPARATION 25 drearfll of the pecuniary day-dreamer." as Veblcn observed, "lake shape as a calculus of profit and loss computed in standard unit* of an impersonal magnitude." Men became powerful to the extent that 11 it-y neglected the real world of wheal and wool, food and clothes, and neutered their attention on the purely quantitative rep-m■-•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 the inei hanii ul world-picture. So the abstractions of capitalism preceded the abstractions of modern science and re-enforced at every
poinl i!; typical lessons and its typical methods of procedure. The . i.i i 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 e>e to perceive color, so the mind of man has been formed to understand, not all sorts of things, but quantities. It perceive* any given thing more clearly in proportion as dial, thing is close to hare quantities as to its origins, but the fttither a thing recedes from quantities, lite more darkness and error inheres in it."
Was it an accident that the founders and patrons of the Royal Sodel) in London—indeed some of the first experimenters in the physical sciences—were merchants from the City? King Charles 11 might laugh uncontrollably when he heard that these gentlemen had spent their time weighing air; but their instincts were justified, their procedure was correct: the method itself bclungcd to their tradition, and there was money in it. The power that was science and the power that was money were, in final analysis, the same kind of power: the power of abstraction, measurement, quantification.
But it was not merely in the promotion of abstract habits of thought and pragmatic interests and quantitative estimations that capitalism prepared the way for modern technics. From the beginning machines and factory production, like big guns and armaments, mad© direct demands for capital far above the small advances necessary to provide the old-style handicraft worker with tools or keep him nJiv*. The freedom to operate independent workshops and factories, to use
o6 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
machines and profit by them, went to those who had command of capital. While the feudal families, with their command over the laud, often had a monopoly over such natural resources as were found in the earth, and often retained an interest in glus-makiug, coalmining, and iron-works right down to modern times, the new mechanical inventions lent themselves to exploitation by the merchant clashes. The incentive to mechanization lay in the greater [Mollis that could be extracted through the multiplied power and efficiency of the machine.
Thus, although eapilali-m and technics must be clearly distinguished at even stage, one conditioned the other and reacted upon it. The merchant accumulated capital bj widening the scale of his operations, quickening his turnover, and discovering new territories for exploitation: the inventor carried on a parallel process by exploiting new method- of production and devising new tiling- to be produced. Sometimes trade appealed a- a rival to the machine by offeringgreater opportunities foi profit: sometimes it curbed further development! in order to increase the profit of a particular monopoly: both motive- aie still operative in capitaiisl 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 new materials from the Indie- .md iioni th? \inei!<a-. new foods, new cereals, tobacco, I in-: it was trade that found a new market for the trash that was turned OUl by eighteenth cent in y ma—production: it Was trade— abetted by w.n—that developed the large-scale enterprises arid the .i<Jumn-iialive capacity and method that made it possible to create the industrial system as a whole and weld together its various parts.
Whether machine^ would have been invented so rapidly and pushed SO zealously without the extra incentive of commercial profit is extremely doubtful: for all the more skilled hatidicra It occupations were deeply tntienched, and the introduction of printing, for example, was delayed ii< iiiueh as twenty years in Paris by the bitter Opposition of the guild of s,-tibes and copvi-tH. But while technics Undoubtedly owes ;in hone-i debt to capitalism, as it does likewise to wur, it was nevertheless unfortunate that the machine was coudi-
19 1 Ml - mi iv  UOUMIIUI. Jill ,!|| tin   f.....<
- r i i c 11 i ci in i M |.
cultural preparation
27
United, at the outset, by these foreign institutions and took on char-.icleristi. - that had nothing essentially to do with die leclinical processes or the form- of work. Capitalism utilized the machine, not to further social welfare, but to increase private profit; mechanical instruments were used for the agpr.indizement of the ruling classes. It was because of capitalism that the handicraft indu-u ics in both Europe Mid other part- of the world were reckles-ly deslroycd 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 the machine, evm when it improved nothing, even when technically speaking it wa- a 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 wa- necessary to haiinoiiv 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 inlere'ts. The machine has suffered for the sins of capitalism; contrariwise, capital, ism has often taken credit for the virtue- of the machine.
l!y supporting the machine, capitalism quickened its puce, and gave a special incentive to preoccupation with mechanical improvement-: though it often failed to reward the inventor, it succeeded by blandishments and promises in stimulating him to further effort. In many departments the pace was over-accelerated, and the stimulus was oveiapplicd: indeed, the necessity to promote continual changes and improvements, which has been characteristic of capitalism, introduced an clement of instability into technics and kept society from assimilating it- mechanical improvements and integrating them in an appropriate social pattern. As capitalism itself baa developed and expanded, these vices have in fact grown more enormous, and the dangei- to society as a whole have likewise grown proportionately, Enough here to notice the close historical association of modern technics and modern capitalism, and to point out that, for all this historical development, there is no necessary connection between them. Capitalism has existed in other civilisations, which had Si relatively low technical development; and technics made steady im-
28
Tti:n
nh:s and civilization
movements bom the tenth to the fifteenth century without the sped*) Switiw of capitalism- But the style of *« »■ llP t0 Hi*
present heen powerfully influenced by capitalism: the emphasis upon hieiK-cs. for example, is a commercial trait; it appeared in guild halls :„,d merchant hni.-cs long hefore it was evident in technics, with its Origmally trtodesl scale Of operations.
5; From Fable to Fact
Meanwhile, with the transformation 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 heen enveloped as in a cloud from tin dee.iv of the classic schools of thought onward, began in lift: the beautiful culture of Provence whose language Dante him-iclf li.ni thought perhaps lo use for his Divine Comedy, was the first hud of the new order: a hud destined to be savagely blighted liy I he Alhlgensian crusade.
Every culture lives within its dream. That of Christianity was one in which n fabulous heavenly world, filled with gods, saints, devilj, demons, angel-, archangels, cherubim and seraphim and dominions and powers, shot its fantastically magnified shapes and images across i\\f actual life nf e.irildtorn man. This dream pervades the life of a culture us die fantasies of night dominate the mind of a sleeper: it is reality—while the -leep lti-ts. But. like the sleeper, a culture lives within an objective world that goes on through its sleeping or waking, and sometimes breaks into the dream, like a noise, p> modify it or to make further deep impo--l|,|e_
By a slow natural process, the world of nature broke in upon the medieval dream of hell and paradise and eternity: in the fresh naturalistic sculpture of the thirteenth century chimb.- one run watch the first uneasy >tir rd the sleeper,, a* the light of morning -Irikes Ins eyes. At fit-t. the raftsman's interest in nature was a confuted one: side by side with the fine carvings of oak leaves and liauthom sprays, faithfully copied, irnderly arranged, the sculptor Still en-nte.l 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 no'fve feeling of the thirteenth century artist tamed boo tl„. systematic exploration of the sixteenth century botanists snd
physiologi-!-.
•In the Middle Ages," as EmUe Male sniJ, '-the idea of a thing which a man burned for himsrlf was always more mil than the actual tiling itself, and we see why these mystical ecnturie, had no con-eeption of what men now cull science. The study of thing* for tlieir own take held no meaning for the thoughtful 111.ui. . . . The iu?.k foi the student of nature was tn discern the eternal truth thai God
WOUld have each llnrig express." In escaping tiliss utlitude, the vulgar
had an advantage dvci the learned: thrir minds were less capable of forging their own shackles, A rational common mtse interest id Nature w.is not a product of the new classical learning of the Renafr centre; lather, one mii-l say. thai a few centuries after it had hVuir-ished among llic peasant- and the ma-ons, it made its way by another route intn the court and the study and the university, Yillaid ile Honnecourl'a notebook, the precious Impie-i (>i a preai master-mason, ha- drawing? of a hear, a -wan, a grasshopper, a By, a dragonfly, ■ lobster, a lion and a pair of par roquets, all done directly from lile. The l>ook of Nature reappeared, as in a palimpsest, through the heavenly book of tin Word.
During the Middle Ages the < sternal world had had no conceptual hold upon the ruui.l. Nalmal facts were insignificant compared tvitb
the diviro.....ler and intention which Chri-i and his Church bad
revealed: ll»< \i-ihlc world was merely a pledge and a symbol ul thai I leni.il W'.ol.l of whose hll-ses and damnations it gave such a keen foretaste. People ate and drank and mated, basked in the sun and grew solemn under the stars; but there was little meaning in tftts immediate stale: whatever significance the items of daily life hud . „. -i accsoii.- and costumes and rehearsals for the drama oi Man's pilgrimage through eternity. Ho* far could the mind go in scientific mensuration and observation as long as the mystic num-1" i s three and four and seven and nine and twelve filled every relation with an allegorical significance, Before the sequence* in nature could be studied, it was necessary to discipline the imagination and sharpen the i isiom mystic second sight must be converted into factual
TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
30
hrst sight. The artists had a fuller part in this discipline than they have usually been credited with. In enumerating the many parts (Jf nature that cannot be studied without the "aid and intervening of mathematics," Francis Bacon properly includes perspective, musie, architecture, and engineering along with the sciences oi astronomy and cosmography.
The change in attitude toward nature manifested itself in solitary figures long before it became common. Roger Bacon's c\pcrimental precepts and his special re-earches in optica have long been commonplace knowledge; indeed, like the scientific vision of his Elizabethan namesake they have been somewhat overrated: their significance lies in the fact that they represented a general trend. In the thirteenth centurv, 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." Danle and Petrarch, unlike most medieval men, no longer avoided mountains as mere terrifying obstacles that increased the hardships of travel: they sought them and climbed them, for the exaltation that comes from the conquest of distance and the attainment of a bird's-eye view. Later, Leonardo explored the hills of Tuscany, discovered fossils, made correct interpretations of the processes of geology: Agricola, urged on by his interest in mining, did the same. The herbals and treatises on natural history that came out during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though they still mingled fable and conjecture with fact, were resolute steps towurd the delineation of nature: their admirable pictures still witness this. And the little books on the seasons and the routine of daily life moved in the same direction. The great painters were not far behind. The Sistine Chapel, no less than Rembrandt's famous picture, was an anatomy lesson, and Leonardo was a worthy predecessor to Vesalius, whoso life overlapped his. In the sixteenth century, according In Beekmaim, there were numerous private natural history collections, and in 1659 Eliaa 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, ibe 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 the 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 bbitaof animistic thinking. Despile animism, such dissociations had indeed been made in the past: one of the greatest of such acta waa the invention of the wheel. Even in the relatively advanced cmliaaUoil of die Assyrians one sees representations of great rtatues beug moved across bare ground on a sledge. Doubtless the notion of the wheel came originally from observing that rolling » 1°* ^ shoving it: but trees existed for untold years and the trees had gone on for many thousands, in all liWAood, neolithic inventor performed the stunning act of dissocuwon made possible the cart i**toA
So long as every object, animate or *"J^t as the dwelling place of a spirit, solong a. one expected * nw"
direction, ine gfeaipa inters wet e nut iui oem
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 sought to serve. Just as the Egyptian workman, when lie 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 djinnj for power, instead of contriving their abstract equivalent, retarded the development of the machine. Nature often a--i-ts in such abstraction: die sign's use of it- wing may have suggested the sail, even a* the hornet's not siuree-led paper. Conversely, the body itself |, a sort of microcosm of the machine: the arms are levers, the lungs arc bellows, the eyes are lenses, the heart i- a pump, the fist is a hammer, the nerves are a telegraph system connected with a central station: Inn on the whole, the mechanical instruments were invented before the physiological functions were accurately described. The moat ineffective kind of machine is ihe realistic mechanical imitation of a man or another animal: technics remembers Vaueanson for his loom, rather tli.ui foi hi- lite-like mechanical duck, which not merely ate food but went through tin.- routine <>l digestion and excretion.
The. original advances in modern leclmics became possible only when a mechanical -yMcm could be isolated fiotn the entire tissue of relations. Not merely did ihe first airplane, like that of Leonardo, Ottempl to reproduce the motion of birds' wings: as late as m()l Ader's hallike airplane, which now 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 a-, possible like- birds3 feather*. .Similarly, ihe belief that reciprocating molion. as in ihe movement of the urms and leg=. was the "natural" form of motion was used to justify opposition lo the 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 head and torso Df a man. Circular motion, one of the most useful and frequent attributes of a fully developed machine is, earioiuly, one of the least observable motions in nature: even ihe stars do not describe .1 circular course, and except for ibe rotifers, man himself, in occasional dunces and handsprings, is die chief exponent of rotary molion.
33
CliLTUHAL PKCPA RATION The specific triumph of the technical imagination retted on the ability to dissociate lilting power fruin the arm ami rrcate a crane: to dissociate work from the anion of men and animals and creule the water-mill: lo dissociate light from the enmhnstion of wood ami nil and create tho electric lamp. I-'oi thousands of years ariimi-m had Stood in the way of this development; far it had concealed the entire fuce of nature behind a scrawl ol human forms: even die star* Merc grouped together in the living figures of Castor and Pollux or the Bull on the faintest points of resemblance. Life, not content with its own province, hail (lowed incontinently into -t«>ne-, rivers, start, and all the natural ■ laments: the external environment, because it sva* so iuunedi.il-h pait of man, remained capricious, mi'i lueums. a reflection of hi- own disordered urges and fears.
Since tli- w..r!d seemed, 111 essence, animistic, and since these "external" powers threatened man, the only method of escape that his own WtU-tO-pOwer could follow was either the discipline 'he sell or the lonijur-t nf oilier men: the way of religion ov 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 machine; as lor the discipline of the personality it was esscn-tiallv, during the Middle Ages, ilia province of the Church, and it hod gone farthest, of course, not among the peawinu and nobles, still clinging to essentially pagan ways of thought, with which the Church bad . ipediemly compromised: it had gone farthest in the moii.i-ld lei and (be uiuwiMlies,
il„e auum-rn was extruded by a sense of the omnipotent, of a Single spun, .efined, by the very enlargemem of His dut.«. out ol art, semblance of merely human or animal capacities. Cod hao creatcd an orderly world, and his Law prevailed perhaps inscrutable; but they were not capricious: ihe whole burden of the religion* Ufa was to create an attitude 0 humility toward the ways of God and the world he had created. If the uuderlymg frnth of the Middle Age, remained superstitious and amnnsue. d« physical doctrines of the Schoolmen were in fact anU-ae-m.*.* the gist of the matter was that God's world was not roan*. «* 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 their in. heritors, like Descartes, had begun to take advantage of the old breach by describing on a purely mechanical haws 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 air 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 lo the Machine. For God became in the eighteenth century the Eternal Clorkinaker who, having conceived and created -And wound up the clock of the universe, had no further responsibility until the machine ultimately broke up—or, as the nineteenth century thought, until the woiks ran down.
The method of science and technology, in their developed forms, implies a sterilization of the self, an elimination, as far as possible, of the human bias and preference, including the human pleasure in man's own image and the instinctive belief in the immediate presentations of his fantasies. What better preparation could a whole culture have lor such an ellort than die spread ol the monastic system ami 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 non-animistic, 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, than 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 wen- 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 anil focussed the masculine will-to-power: a BUC. PjsSion ol military leaders came from the religious orders, while the leader of the order that exemplified the ideals of the ('.ounier-Uefor-niation began hil life as a soldier. One of the first experimental scientist-, Roger Bacon, was a monk; so, again, was Michael Slifel, who in 1514 widened the use of symbols in algebraic equations; die monki stood high in the roll of mechanics and inventur-. The »|iiriiual routine of iho monastery, if it did not positively favor die machine, at least nullified many o( the influem    that worked against it. Arid unlike the similar discipline of the Buddhist-, thai n| iln Western monk.- gave i is-- to 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 for the body. Now respect for tin- body and its organs is deep in all the classic cultures of the past. Sometimes, in being imaginatively projected, the body maj be displaced symbolically by the pan- or organs pi another animal, as in the Egyptian Horn*: but the substitution is made for lb.- - Ac of intensifying some organic quality, the power of muscle, eye. genitals. The phalluses thai were carried in a
religious pro......sioii were greater and more powerful, by teprescii-
tation, thin the actual human organ-: s„. too, the images of the sods might attain hi roic size, to accentuate their vitality. The whole ritual of Life in the old cultures tended to emphasize respect lor the body and to dwell on its beauties and delights: even the monk- who painted the Ajanla caves of India were under its spell. The enthronement ol the human form in sculpture, and the care of the body ,n ^ palestra oi the Greeks or the baths of the Romanv ^forced udsinnc, iceling b, the organic.   The legend about: typifies ,!,, honor and the resentment that classic peoples kit against the mutil itimi ol the body: one made beds to fit human hemes one did not I bop oil legs or beads Co fit beds.
This affirmative sense of the body surely never d.sappesred even during the severcsl triumph, oi Ch, tatianity: every '.ew P^"™** recovers it through their physical delight in-^ the prevalence of gluttony as R A during the Middle Ages wa
i^ěTTwassnSuenTS
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 Hah ami Neith. Asiaite and Psyche, or the Angels of Uiii-liamty. In the thirteenth eeuiuiy. this (Ileum reappeared piopbelically in the mind of Hogei Bftoon. The flying carpet of the Aral.i.m Night?. th« -rwn-lc.limed DOOtS, the wishing ling, wcr. all evidences of the desire to fly. to travel fast, to diminish space, to remove the dhstscJi of distance. Along with this Went a fairly constant de-ire to deliver the body from its infirmities, from its early aging, which dries tip EM powers, end from tne diseases that threaten life even in the midst pi vigor and yonlh. The god* may be defined
as in [ngs of somewhat mure than human stature that have these
OOWen of defying space and time and the Cycle o I growth and decay: even in the Christian legend the abilil] to make the lame walk and the blind see is one of the proofs ol podhood. lmhotep and Aesculapius \i\ reasorj • •! then -kill in the medical arts, were raised into deities by the Egyptians; n ml die Greek.-, Oppressed by want and starvation, the dream of the horn of plenty and the Earthly Paradi-c continued In haunt rn.iii.
It w js in the North llut these niylhs of extended powers took on an added ftnnness, perhaps. Írom the actual achievements of the miners and smiths: one remembers Thor, master of the thunder, whose magic hammer made him so potent: one remember.- Loki, the cunning and mischievous god ol fire: one romemhci - the gnomes, who t reated the magic armor and weapons of Siegfried—llinaimen of the Finns, who made a steel eagle, and Wicland, the Cohulottl German smith, who made feather clothes for flight. Hack of all these fables, these collective wishes and Utopias, l.iy the de-tie in picv.ul over the brute nature of thing-.
But the very dreams that exhibited tlx■•■■<■ il.-n-s were a revelation of the diiheiilly of achieving them. The dream give;- direction to human activity and both expresses the innei urge of the organism and conjures up appropriate goal-, lint when the dream strides too far ahead of fact, it tends to short-, inmt Setion: the anticipatory subjective pleasure serves as a surrogate for the I bought and contrivance and action that might give it a foothold in reality. The disembodied desire, unconnected with the conditions of its fulfillment or Willi its means of expression, leads nowhere: at most it contributes
cultural preparation m
to an inner equilibrium. How difficult wa* the discipline required before mechanical invention became possible one sees in the pan played by mogle in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Magic, like pure fantasy, was i short cut to knowledge and power. But even in the roost primitive form of shaman ism, mngie. involves a drama and an in lion: if one wishes, to kill one's enemy by ui/i^ic, one must at least mould s wax figure and stick pins into it; and similarly, if the need toi gold in early capita I ism promoted a grand quest for the means of Iran-mulmg ba-e meiaU into noble ones, it was accompanied by fumbling and frantic attempts to manipulate the external environment. Under magic, the eaperimentet acknowledged that it was accessary to base a sow'- ear before one could make a silk pur-e: this wa- .1 real udv.iiiie toward matter-of-fact. "The operation-," as Lynn Thomdike well -ays of magir, "were supposed to be efficacious here in the world of external reality*': mugie presupposed a public demonstration rather Uian a merely private gratification.
No one can put his linger on the place where magic hecamc science, where empiricism became systematic expei unenialism, where alchemy becami chemistry, where astrology became astronomy, in short, where ihe need for immediate human ie-ult, and gratifications ceased to leave it- smudgy imprint. Magic was marked above oil perhaps by two una ientific qualities: by secrets and mystifications, and le, a certain impatience for "results." According to Agricoll the transrautationists of the sixteenth century did not hesiUts to conceal gold in a pellet of ore, in order to make their experiment came out sn,, e-slulh similar dodges, like a concealed dork-winder, were used in the numerous perpetual motion machines thot were put forward. Everywhere the dross 0f fraud and charlatanism mingled with the occasional grams ol scientific knowledge that nisgic uulfced
or produced. . ,
But the instruments of research were developed before a mrt »a of procedure was found: and if gold did not come out of lead in the expernn.iii - of the alchemists, Jury are not t<> 1* reproached tor their ineptitude hut congratulated on their audacity: Uierr liruigjna-lions smiled quarry in a cave they could not penetrate, and their
iiwrnn nHivilv :i!KÍ iioth CXUies^es tlie ihrľťŕ Uŕfííf Ul  llir Olfcujiic
f\T   utiiihn if
41)
technics AND CtVlt-IZATION
having anJ poinin.? C*Bed the hunters *      *P<*- s.......thing
,,,,,„. important ili.iu gold «me out of the researches "1 the ,l,hem-ists* the retort and tlie furnaee and the ah-i.il.«.-: the habit ,.l manipu-lalinn by crushing, grinding, firing, distilling, dissolving- valuable apparatus W real experiments, valuable methods I,., real acienoe, The source of authority tor the magician* ceased to be Aristotle and the Fathers of die Church: they relied upon what their hands could do and their eves could sec. with the aid '.1 mortal and pestle and furnace. Magic rested on demonstration rather than dialectic: more than anything else, perhaps, except painting, it released European diought from the tyranny of the written text.
In sum, magic turned men's minds to the eNtnn.il world: it suggested the need of manipulating it: it helped create the toola 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 dings, one must not forget that one of the few genuine specifics in medicine, quinine, comes from the cinchona bark, and thai chnulmnogra oil, used with success in treating leprosy, likewise comes from an exotic tree. As children's play anticipates crudely adnli life, so did magic anticipate modern science and technology: it wa- chief!J the lack of direction that was fantastic: the difficulty was not in using the instrument but in finding a field where it could be applied and 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 eflY.it to develop the technique which has given us Ehrlichia salvarsan or Bayer 207. But magh mas the bridge that united fantasy with technology: the dream of power with the engines of fulfillment. The subjective confidence ol the magicians, seeking to inflate their private egos with b.....wllcss wealth and mysterious energies, surmounted even their practical failures: then fiery hopes, their crazy dreams, their cracked homunculi continued
' I I'llKU REPARATION « to gleam in the ashrs: to has.- dreamed so riotously was to make die
technics that fo flowed less Incredible and hence less impossible.
H: Social Regimentation
II mechanical thinking and ingenious expei inn-nl produced the
machine, regimentation gave it u soil t<i grow in: the social process
worked b.....I in hand with the new i. leu logy and the new technics,
Long before the peoples of the ^ estem World turned to the machine,
mediani-in as an element in social liJo had come into existence. Heroic inventors crealed 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 lo machines. The slaves and peasants who hauled the stones fur the pyramids, pulling in rhythm to the crack of the whip, the slaves working in the Roman galley, each man chained to his seat and unable to pei form any other motion than the limited mei h.mieal one, the order ami march and system of attack of the Macedonian phalanx—these were all machine phenomena. Whatever limits the actions and movements of human beings to their bate mechanical elements belongs to (he physiology, if not to the mechanics, of the machine age.
From the fifteenth century on invention and regimental ion worked reciprocally. The increase in the number and kinds of machines, mills, guns, clocks, lifelike automata, miisi 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 aiu.lv/iiig die physiology of the human body, remarks that its func-tinning apart fu.m the guidance of the will does not "appear at all strange to those who are acquainted with the variety of movements performed by the different autumnta, or moving machines lubricated by human industry, and with the help of but a few pieces compared with the great multitude of Iwiies, nerves, arteiies, veins, and other parts that are found in the body of each animal. Such person* will look upon this body as a machine made by the hand of God." But the opposite process was also true: the mechanization of human habits prepared the way for mechanical imiuilions.
ic3tei
i   i        l.', _ t___
4* technics and civilization
To ihc degree that fear and disruption prevail in *ociety, men tend to seek an absolute: if 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 drillmasler and the book-keeper, the soldier and the bureaucrat. These masters of regimentation gained full ascendency in the seventeenth century. The new bourgeoisie, in counting house and shop, reduced life to a careful, uninterrupted routine: so long for business: so long for dinner: so long for pleasure —all carefully measured out. as methodical as the sexual intercourse of Tristram Shandy's father, which coincided, symbolically, with the monthly winding of the clock. Timed payments: timed contracts: limed work: timed meals: from thi> period on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or trie clock. Waste of time became for 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 representative as a tale not only because it was the work of one of the new breed of writers, the professional journalists, but because it combines in a single setting the element of catastrophe and adventure with the necessity for invention. In the new economic system every man was for 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 n desert island the sober middle class virtues would carry one through. . . •
Protestantism re-enforced these lessons of middle class sobriety and gave them God'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. But the peculiar office of Protestantism was to unite finance to the concept of a godly life and to turn the asceticism countenanced by religion into a device for concentration upon worldly goods and worldly advancement. Protestantism rested firmly on the abstractions of print 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 bare Stones of engineering: he distrusted all painting, except perhaps portrait painting, which mirrored his righteousness; and he looked upon the theater and the dance as a lewdness of the devil. Life, in all its sensuous variety and warm delight, was drained out of the Protestant's world of drought: the organic disappeared. Time was real: keep it! Labor was real: exert it! Money was real: save it! Space was real: conquer it! Matter was real: measure it! These were the realities and the imperatives of 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 thii period the mesh was broken, and a fragment escaped, and launched Irself on a separate career—the will to dominate die emiroamenL To donttV nate, not to cultivate: to seize power, not to achieve form. One can**, plainly, embrace a complex series of events in such simpl* »«0»
rlnmmanf virttips were lhritL tnresielit. skiJJtUl adaptation
+1 TECHNICS A N D (.. I \ I L 1 / A ľ 1 O N
alone, Anotiiťi faciei in the change m&) hsve becfi due to an intensit brd senst- oJ infciiot i t v: this perhaps :mw lliumt'li tie humiliating disparity between nun's ideal pretensions and bi- read accomplishments—between the charity and peace preached h\ the Church and lis eternal wars and fend- and animosities, between the hol) I,]',, a-preached by the saints and the lascivious life a- lived by the Renascence Pope-, between the belief in heaven and the .-iptaltil di-ordei and
distress of actual existence Failing redemption by grace, barmoniza-
fiiin of desire-, the Chi is t i AO riiliir-. people Bought, peiliap-, lo wipe
out their sense of inferiority and overcome theii frustration bj seeking power.
At all event-, 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 conception of human life and destiny, winch originally bad sprung out of the misery and terror that had attended both the brutality of Imperialistic Rome i[s ultimate putiei.iction and decay. So
remote were the altitudes and concepts of Christianity from the facta of the natural world and of human life, thai OBCe the world itself was opened up by navigation and exploration, b) thi new cosmology, by new methods of observation and experiment, there "as no returning to the broken 'hell of the old order, The šplh between the Heavenly system and the Earthly one had become tôó grave to be overlooked, too wide to be bridged: human life had a destiny out-
-ide that shell. The crudest science touched closer to contemporary
truth than the most refined siluda-lici-tn: the rlum-ie-t -team engine or spuming jenny bad mote efficiency than the soundest guild regulation, and lbe paltriest factory and iron bridge had more promise for architecture than the moat masterly buildings of Wren and Adam; the first yard of cloth woven bv machine, the fir*! plain 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 organism of medieval culture was dead.
From the fifteenth century lo lite seventeenth men lived in an empty world: a world that was daily growing emptier, 'Ibey said
CULTURAL PREPARATION « their prayers, they repeated their brum Us; ihey even sought to
retTieve ihe holmes- they hud lost by resurrecting superstitions tb.ev bad long abandoned: hetlce the fiereetie-s and hollow fanaticism
of the Counter-Reformation, its hurtling of heretics, its persecution of will be-, precisely in the midst of the growing "enlightenment/' They threw tnetnsrlu-' back into the medieval dream with a new intensity ol feeling, ii not conviction: they carved and painted and
wro|,---who indeed ever hewed mole mightily in -tone lhari Michel-
angclo, who wrote with limit- spectacular ecstasy and vigor than Shakespeare? But beneath the surlace occupied by ihe.-r works of art and thought was a dead world, an empty world, a void that no amount of da-h and bravura could fill up. The arts shot up into the air in a hundred pul-in^ fountains, for ii i- juM at the moment of cultural and social dissolution that the mind oflen works with a freedom and iiilcn-ilv that i- not possible when the social pattern is stable and life as a whole is more satisfactory: but the idoham itself had become empty.
Men no longer believed, without practical reservations, in heaven and bell and the communion of the saints: still less did ihey believe in tin* smooth gods and goddesses and sylph* and muses whom ihey used, with elegant but meaningless gestures, to adorn their thoughts and embellish theii environment; these supernatural figures, though they were human in origin and in consonance with certain stable human needs, had become wraiths. Observe the infant Je-tra of a ihut,. nth century allarpiece: the infant lies on an altaT. opart; the Virgin is nan li\ed and beatified by the presence of the Holy Ghost: the myth is real. Observe the Holy Families of the sixteenth and seventeenth century painting: fashionable young ladies are coddling their well-fed human infants: the myth has died. First only tin- poll- on clothes are Ml: 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 Messiah; the machine.
«>: The Mechanical Universe
The issues of practical life found their justification and their appropriate frame of ideas in the nuturol 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 pari undermined by the further pursuit of science itself. A series of drinkers, Bacon, Descartes. Galileo, Newton. Pascal, defined the province of science, elaborated its special technique of research, and demonstrated its elliciicy,
Ai the beginning of the seventeenth century there were only scat1 lend effort* of thought, some scholastic, some Aristotelian, tame mathemalical and scientific, as in the astronomical observations of Copernicus. Tycho Bruhe. and Kepler: the machine bad 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 arliculaled philosophy of the universe, on purely mechanical lines, which served as a starling point for all the physical sciences and for further technical improvements: the mechanical Wrltbild had come into existence. Mechanics set the pattern of successful research and shrewd application. Up to this time the biological science* had paralleled the physical sciences: thereafter, for at least a century and a half, they played second fiddle; and it was not until after 18<i() 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 die 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 io 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 llie observer as respects the data with which be works. Third: isolation; limitation of the field: specialization of interest and subdivision of labor. In short, what the physical sciences call the world is not the total object of common human experience: it is just those aspects of this experience
CULTURAL PREPARATION
il.al lend themselves to accurate factual observation and to ^n-eralized statements. One may define a mechanical system ai one in which any random sample of the whole will serve in place of the whole: «n ounce of pure watrr in the laboratory i» 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 lime 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 practical purposes, as if they completely represented the "physical world" from which they had been extracted.
This elimination of the organic had the justification not only of practical inteiesi but of history itself. Whereas Socrates had turned hi- back upon the Ionian philosophers because he was more concerned to learn about man's dilemmas lhan to learn about trees, rivers, and stars, all that could be called positive knowledge, which bad survived the rise and fall of human societies, were just such non-vital truths as 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 astronomy 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 the varying rale of speed and the changes of position that takes place in the nearer and more familial object. '!'•> /ii attention upon a mechanical ivilem wu the fint ttep totvard creating system: an important victory for rational thought By centering effort upon the non-historic and the inorganic, the physical sciences clarified the entire procedure of analysis: for the held 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. 8W "he te«J physical world was still not simple enough for the scientific m*bod
f l H n l    lj 1
48 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
in ils first stages of development: it was necessary to reduce it to such elements as could be ordered in term-, of space, time, mass, motion, quantity. The amount of elimination and rejection that accompanied this was excellently described b> t.alileo. who gave the process such a strong impetus. One must quote him in full:
"As soon as I form a conception of a material or corporeal Bub-stunce, I simultaneously feel the necessity of Conceiving ihal it has boundaries of some shape or other; that relatively to others it is great or small; that it is in this or that place, in tlii- or thai time; that it is in motion or at rest; that it touches, or dors Mn| touch, another body; that it is unique, rare, or common; nor can I, by any act of imagination, disjoin it from these qualities. But 1 do not find myself absolutely compelled to apprehend it as neecss,u ily accompanied by such conditions us that it must be while or red. bitter or sweet, sonorous or silent, smelling sweetly ot disagreeably; and if the senses had not pointed out these qualities language and imagination alone could never have arrived at them. Iher. Ion- I lliink that these t.]s(cs, smells color-, eh., with regaid to tin' object in which line appear to reside, are nothing more than mere names. They exist only in the sensitive body, for when the living creature is
removed all these qualities are nr.....I o!T and annihilated, although
we have imposed particular names upon tlu-m, and would fain persuade ourselves that they truly and in fact e>.i-t. I do not believe that there exists anything in externa] bodies for exciting tastes, smeBs, and sounds, etc., except siZr, shape, quantity, and motion."
In other words, physical science confined Itself to the -,0-called primary qualities: the secondary qualities are -purned as subjective. But a primary quality is no more ultimate or elementary than a secondary quality, and a sensitive body is no less real than an insensitive body. Biologically speaking, smell was highly important for survival: more so, perhaps, than the ability to discriminate distance or weight: for it is the chief means of determining whether food is fit to eat, and pleasure in odors not merely refined the process of eating but gave a special association to the visible symbols of erotic interest, sublimated finally in perfume. The primary qualities could be called prime only in terms of mathematical
CULTURAL PREPARATION ,w analysis, because they had. as an ultimate point of reference, an independent measuring stick for time and space, a clock, a ruler, a
balance,
The value of concent rating upon primary qualities, was thai it neutralized in experiment and analysis the sensory and emotional reaction.; of the observer: Lip.nl from die process of thinking, he became an instrument of record. In this manner, scientific: technique became communal. Impersonal, objective, within its. limited field, the purely conventional "material world." This technique resulted in a valuable moralizatinn oi thought: the standards, first worked out in realms foreign to man's personal aims and immediate inter-esls, were equally applicable to mole complex aspeiIs of reality thai stood closer to his hopes, loves, ambitions. Rut the first effect of this advance in clarity and in sobriety of thought was lo devaluate every departmerd oi experieni e except that which lent itself to mathematical investigation- When the Royal Society was founded in England, the humanities wotc dehberaiely excluded.
In general, the practice of the physical sciences meant an intensification uf the senses: the eye had never before been so sharp, the ear so keen, the hand so accurate. Ilooke, who had seen how'glasses improved seeing, doubted not that "there may be found Mechanical Invention- to improve our other senaeS, of hearing, smelling, lasting, touching." l>ui with this gain in accuracy, went a deformation of experieni e as a whole. The iu-Uuineuts of science were helpless in the realm of qualities, The qualitative was reduced to the subjective: the Bubjei iin' was dismissed as unreal, and the unseen and immeasurable in■!■ existent. Intuition and feeling did not affect mechanical process or mechanical explanations. Much could he accomplished by the new science and the new technics because much that wbb associated with life and work in the past—art, poetry, organic rhythm, fantasy—was deliberately eliminated. As the outer world of perception grew in importance, the inner world of feeling became more and mure impotent.
The division of labor and the specialiaation 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:
.Us
imin/ltft d
JS8
50 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
they were expressions of the same desire for mechanical accuracy and for quick results. The field of research was progressively divided up, and small parts of it were subject to intensive examination: in small measures, so to say, truth might perfect he. This restriction was a great practical device. To know the complete nature of an 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 (com the beginning, and not give it too much friendly attention or human sympathy or even esthetic appreciation: if one treats the life of the chicken as an end. one may even with Bralindnical thoroughness preserve the lice in its feathers as well as the bird. Selectivity is an operation nece-sarily adopted by die organism to keep 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 and abstraction, while important to orderly research and refined symbolic representation, are likewise conditions under which real organisms die, or at least cease to function effectively. The rejection of experience in its original whole, besides abolishing images and disparaging the non-instrumental aspects of thought, had another grave result: on the positive side, it was a belief in the dead; for the vital processes often escape close observation so long as the organism is alive. In short, the accuracy and simplicity of science, though they were responsible for its colossal practical achievements, were not an approach to objective reality but a departure from it. In their desire to achieve exact results the physical sciences scorned true objectivity: individually, one side of the personality was paralyzed; collectively, one side of experience was ignored. To substitute mechanical or two-way time for history, the dissected corpse for the living body, dismantled units called "individuals" for men-in-groups, or in general lite mechanically measurable or reproducible for the inaccessible and the complicated and the organically whole, is to achieve a limited practical mastery
cultural preparation m
at the expen-e 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, mid by isolating and dismembering the corpus of experience, the physics] scientist created a habit of mind
favorable to discrete practical inventions: at the same time it was highly unfavorable to all those forms of art for which the secondary qualities and the individualized receptors and motivators of the
artist were oJ fundamental importance. By his consistent metaphysical
principle- anil in-, (actual method of research, the physical scientist denuded the world of natural and organic objects and turned his back upon real experience: he substituted for the body and blood of reality a skeleton of eilei the abstractions which he could manipulate with appropriate u lie: and pulleys*.
What was left was the bare, depopulated world of matter and motion: a waste) iiid. In order to thrive at all, it was necessary for ihe inheritors of the seventeenth century idolum to fill the world up again with new organisms, 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-picture was established, machines could thrive and multiply and dominate existence: their competitors had been exterminated or had been consigned to a penumbra 1 universe in which only artists aud lovers and breeders ot animals dared to believe. Were machines not conceived in terms of primary qualities nlone, without regard to appearance, sound, or any other sort of sensory stimulation? If science presented un ultimate reality, then the machine was, like die law in Gilbert's ballad, the Hue embodiment of everything that was excellent. Indeed in this empty, denuded world, the invention of 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 ol power, but power ripped loose from his flesh and isolated from his humanity.
54 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
10: The Duty lo Invent
The principles thai had proved effective in the development of the scientific method were, with appropriate change-, those that served as a foundation for invention. Technic- is a translation into appropriate, practical forms of the theoretic truths, implicit or iormulaled, anticipated or discovered, of science. Science and tech-nics form two independent yet related worlds: sometimes converging, sometimes drawing apart. Mainly empirical invent ion-, 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, both closely connected with the practice of agriculture to the latest researches in electro-physics, Leonardo'- dictum holds true: >, ieiice is the captain and practice the soldiers. But sometimes ihe Soldiers win the battle without leadership, and sometimes the captain, by intelligent strategy, obtains victory without actually engaging in battle.
The displacement of the living and the organic took place rapidly with the early development of the machine, for the machine was n counterfeit of nature, nature analysed, regulated, narrowed, controlled by the mind of men. The ultimate goal of ft- development was however not the mere conquest of nature but her re-ynthesis: dismembered by thought, nature was put together again in new combinations: material synlhesei in chemistry, mechanical syntheses in engineering. The unwillingness to accept the natural envuonment as a fixed and final condition of man's existence hafl always contributed both to his art and his technics: but from the seventeenth century, the attitude became compulsive, and it was to technics that he turned for fulfillment. Steam engines displaced horse power, iron and concrete displaced wood, aniline dye- replaced vegetable dyes, and so on down the line, with bere and there a gap. Sometimes the new product waB superior practically or esthetically to die old, as in die infinite superiority of the electric lamp over the tallow candle: sometimes the new product remained inferior in quality, as rayon is still inferior lo natural silk: but in either event lbe gain was in
I  ANTICIPATIONS OF SPEE
1: Rapid land locomotion: the Mil-wagon (1598) u»ed by Wl«il Maurice ol Orange, one Oi the fust rouimanders lo introduce modern drill. The desire for stm-d. proclaimed by Kiicfi fi.io'.n in the thirteenth century, lud became insistent by ihe <ixlrenlh ''Ul.in. Ib-nce skales tot .|ii>rl.
lCourrc<>, OtOUtS*4 Vicum. 1/unr.Arnl
-.le. lieoilot . Mou i ba i
,, - •        hu.tt ol »nftd.
Alter i«ri<mi npeiim'ui* in Ui*b -hw-U, ihe machine returned In its origin*! lirtea.
i c.W/h), /»(uh. Ari ,Wi/i.'u«i, U.i-i<>ieril
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rh.i"-. ba ii ímjJ hr
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CU1.TI KAL PREPA8A.T10N ^
the creation oi an equivalent product or synthesb ahieh was less dependent upon uncertain organic variations ami 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 of the l.i-i ilinnsaiiil years abounds iir examples oi apparent mechanical Uld Si i i - r 11 í fi t triumphs which were fundamentally unsound. One need onl] meniion bleeding in medicine, the use of common window glass which excluded the important ultra-violet rays, the establish* unii! ní thi pn-t-l.ieltip dietary on the basis of mere energy replace-ment, thi a■> ol the elevated toilet neat, the introduction of steam heat, Which dries the air excessively—but the list is a long and somewhat appalling one. The point is that invention had become a duty, and the desire lo use the new marvels of technics, like a child's delighted bewilderment over new toys, was not in the main guided by critical discernment: people agreed lhal inventions were good, whether ľ r       they actually provided benefits, just as they agreed thai child bearing 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 ľaith 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 inventiLin into a confined head of water above .1 turbine: they could i-parkle jmi ripple and cool and revive and delight no more: they were harnessed for « narrow ami definite purpose: to move wheels and multiply society's capacity for work. To live was to work: what other lift, indeed do machines Anon.' Faith had at last found a new object, not the moving of mountains, but the moving of engines and machines. Power: the application of power 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 action put before men. As everyone recognizes, a thousand salutary instrumenls came out of the now technics, but in origin from iho seventeenth century on the machine served as a substitute religion,
«j&-i
:rrui  mi Itle luľllieľ Uicreasi
54 technics AND CIVILIZATION
and a vital religion does not need the justification of mere utility.
The religion of the 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, uiid the ritual of a mechanical routine was die binding element in the 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 Balvation b> 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 llie accelerated tempo of mechanical improvement. The impersonal procedure of science, the hard-headed contrivances of mechanics, the rational calculus of the utilitarians—these interests captured emotion, all the mure because the golden paradise of financial success lay beyond.
In their compilation of inventions and discoveries. Darmstaedler and Du Bois-Reymond enumerated the following inventors: between 1700 and 1750—170: between 1750 and 1800—344: between 1800 and 1850—861: between 1850 and 1900—1150. Even allowing for the foreshortening brought about automatically In historical perspective, one cannot doubt the increased acceleration between 1700 and 1850. Technics had seized the imagination: the engines themselves and the goods they produced both seemed immediately desirable. While much good came through invention, much invention came irrespective of the good. If the sanction of utility had been uppermost, invention would have proceeded most rapidly in the departments where human need was sharpest, in fond, shelter, and clothing: but although the last department undoubtedly advanced, the farm and the common dwelling house were much slower to profit by the new mechanical technology than were the battlefield and the 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 iu ideology. Virtuosity is an important clement in die development of technics; the interest in the materials as such, the pride of mastery over tools, the skilled manipulation of form. The machine crystallised in new patterns the whole set <>f independent interests which Thorrtein Veblen grouped loosely under '"the instinct of workmanship." and enriched technics as a whole even when it temporarily depleted handicraft. The very sensual and contemplative responses, excluded from love-making and 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 association with the technical arts themselves, and the machine, often lovingly personified as a living creature, as with Kipling's engineers, absorbed die affection and care of both inventor and workman. Cranks, pistons, screws, valves, sinuous motions, pulsalions. rhythms, murmuis. deck 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 that stage was reached, the machine was no longer a means and its operations were not merely mechanical and causal, but human and final: it contributed, like any other work of art, to an organic equilibrium. This development of value within the machine complex ilself, apart from the value of the products created by it, was, as we shall sec at a later st.jp-, a profoundly important result of die new technology.
11: Practical Anticipations
From the beginning, the practical value of science was uppermost in the minds of its exponents, even in those who single-mindedly pursued abstract truth, and who were as indifferent to its popularwa-lion 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 ol 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 ol marfls life." And Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, observes: *Ta*
_ *t_   i ..,.i,r...u
i* TECHNICS AND CIVILISATION
them [general restrictions respecting physics] I pflnsived it to he possible to arrive at knowledge highly Useful in lit. ■: an.l in lieu of (he speculative philosophy usually taught in the schools to discover n practical, by mentis of which, knowing tin- force and net mn of fire, water, air, tin stars, die heaven*, and all the Other bodies that surround! us, as distinctly a? we know the various drafts of mír artisans, we might also apply them in die same way to all the us»- to which they arc adapted, and thus render oiir-clves the lord- and possessors, of nature. And this ir- a result to be desired, not only in order to tlie invention of an infinity of arts, by which we might be able to enjoy widiout any trouble die fruits of lbe earth, and all its comforts, hut also especially for die preservation of health, which i i without doubt of all blessings of this life the first and fundamental one; lor die mind is so intimately dependent upon ihe condition and relation of die organs of die body diai if any means can oyer be found t>, render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, 1 believe that it is in medicine they must he sought for."
Who is rewarded in the perfect commonwealth davised 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 DeSCtltGS, clung very ceremoniously to the rites of die Christian church. For the "ordinances and riles" of Salomon's House there are two galleries. In one of diese "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 pi Music; the Inventor of Letters: the Inventor of Priming: the Invent,., ol observations by astronomy: the Inventor of Works in Metal: the Inventor of Glass: die Inventor of Silk of the Worm: the Inventor of Wine: the Inventor of Corn and Bread: the Inventor of Sugars. ... For upon every invention of value, we erect a statue to the Inventor and give him a liberal and honorable reward." This Salomon's House, as Bacon fancied it, was a eorribinalion of the Rockefeller Institute
CULTURAL PREPARATION S7 and the Dcnl-ches Museum: il ieie, if anywhere, was die means to. ward- the relief of man's estate.
Observe tins: there is little that is vague or fanciful in all these conjectures about the new role to he played by science and the ma, bine. The general Man* of science had worked out the strategy of the , unpaign long before the commanders in the field had developed a tactics capable of carrying out the attack in detail. Indeed, Usher not- - that in lie' seventeenth c.-uiury invention was relatively feeble, and the power of the technical imagination had far outstripped die actual capacities id workmen and engineers. Leonardo, Andteae, Campariella, Bacon, Hooke in his Mitrrographia and Clanvill in hi? See], i■ Scientifica, wrote down in outline the specifications for
the ii,......I. r: ihe use of science lor die advancement of technics,
and the di reel ion ol technic- toward die conquest uf nature were the burden     the whole effort. Bacon's Salomon's House, though formulated afir-i ihe, a, tual founding of the Accademia Lynxei in Italy, was the actual starting point of the Philosophical College that first mel in 1646 at ihe Bullhead Tavern in Cheapside, and in 1662 was duly incorporated as the Royal Society ol London for Improving Natural Knowledge, This society hod eight standing committees, the first of which wa-: to "consider and improve all mechanical inven-tious." Tlie laboratoi ies and technical museums of die twentieth century exist" d first as a thought in the mind of this philosophical cour-tier: nothing that we do or practice today would have surprised him.
So confident in the results of die new approach was Hooke that be wrote: "There is nothing that lies within the power of human wil (or whi.h is far more effectual I of human industry which we might nol compass; we might not only hope for inventions to equalize those „1 Copernicus. Galileo, Gilbert, Harvey, and odiers. Wh«« names arc almost lost, that were the inventors of Gunpowder, the Seaman's Compass. Printing, Etching, Graving. Mi^^ ^
but mul,.....le, that may far exceed diem: (or even those d.scovered
seem to have been dre product of some such methods *ou«h bu imperfect; what may no. be therefore expected from it d d.orougb£ prosecuted? Talking and contention of Argument* wouU soonta turned into labors; all die fine dreams and op.mons and umvcml
W TECHNICS AND r I V II. J Z A T I O N
metaphysical nature, which ihe luxury >>f subtil brains lias devised would quickly vanish and give place to -olid histories, experiments, and work--"
The leading Utopia- of the time, Chrislianopolis, die City of the Sun, to say nothing of Bacon's fragment or Cyrano de Bergerac'g minor works,, all brood Upon the possibility of utilising the machine to make the world more perfect: the machine was the substitute for Plato's justice, temperance, and courage, even a-, it was likewise for the Christian ideal- of grace and redemption. The machine came forth as the new demiurge that was to Create a new heaven and a new earth: at the least, as a new Moses: that was to lead a barbarous humanity into the promised land.
There had been premonitions of all this in the Centuries before. "1 will now mention," said Roger Bacon, "some of the wonderful Works of art and nature in which there is nothing <>f magic and which magic could not perform. Instrument- ma;, be made by which the largest ships, with only one man guiding them, will be carried with greater velocity than if they were full of Bailors. Chariots may be constructed that will move with incredible rapidity without the help of animals. Instruments of living may be formed in which a man, sitting at his ease and meditating hi anv snhjei t, may beat the air with his artificial wings after the manner of birds ... as also machines which will enable men in walk at the bottom of .seas or
rivers without ships." And Leonardo rje \ inei left behind him a list of inventions and contrivances that reads like a synopsis of the present industrial world.
But by die seventeenth century the note of confidence had increased, and the practicuI jmpul-e had become more universal and urgent. Tlie works of Porta. Cardan, Bessou, Bamelli, and oUicr ingenious inventors, engineers, and mathematicians are a witness both to increasing skill and to growing enthusiasm over technics itself. Schwenter in bis Delasserueiits Physico-Matbeiuuti'pies (1636) pointed out how two individual- con hi communicate with each other by means of magnetic needles. "To them that come alter said Clanvill, "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.w, », c„nv(-, nIuy be as usual in future times as by literary correspond. Cyrano de Bergerae conceived the phonograph. Hooke observea inn it is "not impossible to hear a whisper a furlong's distance, it having been already done; and perhaps the nature of things would not make it more impossible, although that furlong be ten times multiplied." Indeed, ha even forecast the invention of artificial silk. And Gbmvill said again: "I doubt not posterity will find many tilings that are now
some
but rumors verified into practical realities. It may be that, „.....
ages hence. i voyage to the Southern tracts, yea. possibly to the moon, will not be more strange than one to America, . , . The restoration of pie\ hairs to juvenility and the renewing the exhausted marrow may at length be effected without a miracle; and the turning of the now comparatively desert world into a paradise may not improbably be effected from late agriculture." (1661)
Whatever was lacking in the outlook of tile seventeenth century it was not lack of faith in the imminent presence, the speedy development, ami the profound importance of the machine. Clock-making: time-keeping:   space-exploration:  monastic  regularity: bourgeois order: technical devices: proleslant inhibitions: magical explorations: finally the magistral order, accuracy, and clarity of the physical    ieiu-es themselves—all these separate activities, inconsiderable perhaps in themselves, had at last formed a complex social and ideological network, capable of supporting the vast weight 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 hail been made. An army of natural philosophers, rationalists, experimenters, mechanics, ingenious people, hod assembled who were clear as to their goal and confident as to their victory. Before more than a streak of grey had appeared at the horizons rim, they procla imed the dawn and announced how wonderful it was: bow marvelous the new day would be. Actually, they were to announce ■ shift in the seasons, perhaps a long cyclical change in the climsle itself.
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