CHAPTER VIIThe Machine Industry
Theera of the machine industry has been designated variously, to answer to the varying point of view from which it has been considered by divers writers. As an historical era it shows divers traits, more or less characteristic, and it has been designated by one or another of these traits according to the particular line of interest that may have directed the attention of those who have had occasion to name it. It is spoken of as the era of the factory system, of large-scale industry, as the age of Capitalism or of free competition, or again as an era of the credit economy. But as seen from the point of view of technology, and more specifically from that of workmanship as it underlies the technological system, it is best characterised as the era of the machine industry, or of the machine process. As a technological period it is commonly conceived to take its rise in the British industrial community about the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the conventional date of the Industrial Revolution,—those who have a taste for precise dates assigning it more specifically to the sixties of that century, to coincide with the earliest practical use of certain large mechanical inventions of that age.138
Such a precise date is scarcely serviceable for any otherthan a mnemonic purpose. If the matter is taken in historical perspective the era of the machine process will be seen to have been coming on in England through the earlier years of the century, and even from before that time; whereas notable mechanical inventions, and engineering exploits of the like general bearing in technology, had begun to affect the industrial situation in some of the Continental countries at an appreciably earlier period. So,e. g., practical improvements had gone into effect in water-wheels, pumps and wind mills, in the use of sails and the designs of shipping, in wheeled vehicles (though the early modern improvements in this particular may easily be over-rated) and in such appliances as chimneys; and, again, there is the peculiar but highly instructive field of applied mechanics represented by the invention and improvement of firearms. Such engineering enterprises as the drainage systems of Holland also belong here and are to be counted among the notable achievements in applied mechanics.
Even the most casual review of the technological situation in Europe, say in the seventeenth century, will bring out characteristic features that cannot be denied honourable mention as applications of mechanical science, although the reserve caution is immediately to be entered that these early mechanical expedients and their employment stand out as sporadic facts of mechanical contrivance in an age of manual work, rather than as characteristic traits of the industrial system in which they are found. The beginnings of the machine industry are of this sporadic character. They come up as an outgrowth of the handicraft technology, particularly at conjunctures where that technology is called on to dealwith such large mechanical problems as exceed the force of manual labour or that elude the reach of the craftsman’s tools.
So,e. g., in England, say from the sixteenth century onward, there are improvements in highways and waterways and in the drainage of agricultural lands; and, as an instance more obviously related to the machine industry as commonly apprehended, there comes early in the eighteenth century the “horse-hoing cultivation” on which Jethro Tull spent his enthusiasm. Along with this obviously mechanical line of endeavour and innovation is also to be noted the deliberate efforts to improve the races of sheep and cattle that were in progress about the same time. These are perhaps not to be rated as mechanical inventions in the simple and obvious sense of the phrase, but they have this trait in common with the inventions of the machine era that they turn ascertained facts of brute nature to account for human use by a logic that has much of that character of impersonal incidence that marks the machine technology. The machine industry comes on gradually; its initial stages are visible in the early eighteenth century, but it is only toward the close of that century that its effects on the industrial system become so pronounced that the era of the machine technology may fairly be said to have set in; and it is only in Great Britain that it can be said to prevail at that period.
Of the other features above alluded to as characteristic of this period of history none are of so substantial a character or so distinctive of this particular period as its technological peculiarities. Free competition,e. g., belongs as much to the era of handicraft as to that of themachine, having prevailed—more extensively in theory than in practice—under the former régime as under the latter; and in point of fact it gradually falls under increasing restrictions as the machine age advances, until in the more highly developed phases of the current situation it has largely ceased to be a practicable line of policy in industrial business. So, also, Capitalism did not take its rise coincident with the industrial revolution, although its best development and largest expansion may lie within the machine age. It had its beginnings in the prosperous days of handicraft, and one capitalistic era had already run its course, on the Continent, before the machine industry came in. The “credit economy,” associated with the capitalistic management of industry, is also of older growth, so far as regards the days of its early vigour, although the larger and more far-reaching developments of credit come effectually into play only in the later decades of the machine age. Much the same is true of the so-called large-scale organisation of industry and the factory system. Its highest development comes with the advanced stages of the machine technology and is manifestly conditioned by the latter, but it was already a force to be counted with at the time of the industrial revolution. The large-scale industry contemplated, with a degree of apprehension, by Adam Smith, e. g., was not based on the machine technology but on handicraft with an extensive division of labour, and on the “household industry” as that was gaining ground in his time. The latter was, in form, what has since come to be known as the “sweatshop” industry.
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In this new era technology comes into close touch withscience; both the science and the technology of the new age being of a matter-of-fact character, beyond all precedent. So much so that by contrast, the technology of handicraft would appear to have stood in no close or consistent relation with the avowed science of its time. Not that anthropomorphic imputation is altogether wanting or inoperative in this latterday scientific inquiry, or in the technological utilisation of the facts in hand; but in the later conceptions anthropomorphism has at the best been repressed and sterilised in an unprecedented degree. And it holds true for the machine technology beyond any other state of the industrial arts that the facts of observation can effectually be turned to account only in so far as they are apprehended in a matter-of-fact way. The logic of this technology, by which its problems are to be worked out, is the logic of a mechanical process in which no personal or teleological factors enter. The engineer or inventor who designs processes, appliances and expedients within these premises is required to apprehend and appreciate the working facts after that dispassionate, opaque, unteleological fashion in which the phenomena of brute matter occur; and he must learn to work out their uses by the logic of brute matter instead of construing them by imputation and by analogy with the manifestations of human workmanship. Less imperatively, but still in a marked degree, the same spirit must be found in the workmen under whose tendance these processes and appliances are to work out the designed results.
Under the simpler technology of more primitive industrial systems recourse to anthropomorphic imputation has also always been a hindrance to workmanlikemastery, more particularly in the mechanic arts proper, and only less pronounced in those industrial arts, like husbandry, that have to do immediately with plants and animals. Knowledge of brute facts as interpreted in terms of human nature appears never to have been serviceable in full proportion to their content. But in these more primitive industrial systems—as also in the better days of handicraft—the workman is forever in instant control of his tools and materials; the movements made use of in the work are essentially of the nature of manipulation, in which the workman adroitly coerces the materials into shapes and relations that will answer his purpose, and in which also nothing (typically) takes place beyond the manual reach of the workman as extended by the tools which his hands make use of. Under these conditions it is a matter of relatively slight effect whether the workman does or does not rate the objects which he uses as tools and materials in quasi-personal terms or imputes to them a degree of self-direction, since they are at no point allowed to escape his manual reach and are by direct communication of his force, dexterity and judgment coerced into the forms, motions and spatial dispositions aimed at by him. His imputing some bias, bent, initiative or spiritual force or infirmity to brute matter will doubtless incapacitate him by so much for efficiently designing processes and uses for the available material facts; his creative imagination proceeds on mistaken premises and goes wrong in so far; and so this anthropomorphic interpretation must always count as a material drawback to technological mastery of the available resources and in some degree retard the possible advance in the industrial arts. But within thepremises given by the industrial arts as they stand, he may still do effective work as a mechanic skilled in the manual operations prescribed by the given state of the arts. For in the mechanic industries of all these other and more archaic industrial systems the workman does the work; it may be by use of tools, and even by help of more or less extended processes in which natural forces of growth, fermentation, decay, and the like, play a material part; but the decisive fact remains that the motions and operations of such manual industry take effect at his hands and by way of his muscular force and manual reach. Where natural processes, as those of growth, fermentation or combustion, are drawn into the routine of industry, they lie, as natural processes, beyond his discretionary control; at the most he puts them in train and lets them run, with some hedging and shifting as they go on, to bring them to bear in such a way as shall suit his ends; he takes his precautions with them and then he takes the chance of their coming to the desired issue. They are not, and as he sees the work and its conditions they need not be, within his control in anything like the fashion in which he controls his tools and the materials employed in his manual operations; they work well or ill, and what comes of it is in some degree a matter of his fortune of success or failure, such as comes to the man who has done his best under Providence. In case of a striking outcome for good or ill from the operation of such natural processes the devout craftsman is inclined to rate it as the act of God; very much as does the devout husbandman who depends on rain rather than on irrigation. It is the part of the wise workman in such a case to take what comes, without elation or repining,in so far as these factors of success and failure are not comprised in his presumed workmanlike proficiency.
The matter lies differently in the machine industry. The mechanical processes here engaged are calculable, measurable, and contain no mysterious element of providential ambiguity. In proportion as they work to the best effect, they are capable of theoretical statement, not merely approachable by rule of thumb. The designing engineer takes his measures on the basis of ascertained quantitative fact. He knows the forces employed, and, indeed, he can employ only such as he knows and only so far as he knows them; and he arranges for the processes that are to do the work, with only such calculable margin of error as is due to the ascertained average infirmity of the available materials. He deals with forces and effects standardised in the same opaque terms. He will be proficient in his craft in much the same degree in which he is master of the matter-of-fact logic involved in mechanical processes of pressure, velocity, displacement and the like; not in proportion as he can adroitly impart to the available materials the workmanlike turn of his own manual force and dexterity, nor in the degree in which he may be able shrewdly to guess the run of the season or the variations of temperature and moisture that condition the effectual serviceability of natural processes in handicraft.
The share of the operative workman in the machine industry is (typically) that of an attendant, an assistant, whose duty it is to keep pace with the machine process and to help out with workmanlike manipulation at points where the machine process engaged is incomplete.139His work supplements the machine process, rather than makes use of it. On the contrary the machine process makes use of the workman. The ideal mechanical contrivance in this technological system is the automatic machine. Perfection in the machine technology is attained in the degree in which the given process can dispense with manual labour; whereas perfection in the handicraft system means perfection of manual workmanship. It is the part of the workman to know the working of the mechanism with which he is associated and to adapt his movements with mechanical accuracy to its requirement. This demands a degree of intelligence, and much of this work calls for a good deal of special training besides; so that it is still true that the workman is useful somewhat in proportion as he is skilled in the occupation to which the machine industry calls him. In the new era the stress falls rather more decidedly on general intelligence and information, as contrasted with detail mastery of the minutiæ of a trade; so that familiarity with the commonplace technological knowledge of the time is rather more imperative a requirement under the machine technology than under that of handicraft. At the same time this common stock of technological information is greatly larger in the current state of the industrial arts; so much larger in volume, and at the same time so much more exacting in point of accuracy and detail, that this commonplace information that is requisite to any of the skilled occupations can nolonger be acquired in the mere workday routine of industry, but is to be had only at the cost of deliberate application and with the help of schools.
On this head, as regards the requirements of industry in the way of general information on the part of the skilled workmen, the contrast is sufficiently marked,e. g., between Elizabethan times and the Victorian age. At the earlier period illiteracy was no obstacle to adequate training in the skilled trades. In the seventeenth century Thomas Mun includes among the peculiar and extraordinary acquirements necessary to eminent success in commerce, matters that are now easily comprised in the ordinary common-school instruction; and in so doing he plainly shows that these acquirements were over and above what was usual or would be thought useful for the common man. Even Adam Smith, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, shrewd observer as he was, does not include any degree of schooling or any similar pursuit of general information among the requisites essential to the efficiency of skilled labour. Even at that date it appears still to have been true that the commonplace information and the general training necessary to a mastery of any one of the crafts lay within so narrow a range that what was needful could all be acquired by hearsay and as an incident to the discipline of apprenticeship. Within a century after the first inception of the machine industry illiteracy had come to be a serious handicap to any skilled mechanic; the range of commonplace information that must habitually be drawn on in the skilled trades had widened to such an extent, and comprised so large a volume of recondite facts, that the ability to read came to have an industrial value; thehigher proficiency in any branch of the mechanic arts presumed such an acquaintance with fact and theory as could neither be gained nor maintained without habitual recourse to printed matter. And this line of requirements has been constantly increasing in volume and urgency, as well as in the range of employments to which the demand applies, until it has become a commonplace that no one can now hope to compete for proficiency in the skilled occupations without such schooling as will carry him very appreciably beyond the three R’s that made up the complement of necessary learning for the common man half a century ago.
It follows as a consequence of these large and increasing requirements enforced by the machine technology that the period of preliminary training is necessarily longer, and the schooling demanded for general preparation grows unremittingly more exacting. So that, apart from all question of humanitarian sentiment or of popular fitness for democratic citizenship, it has become a matter of economic expediency, simply as a proposition in technological efficiency at large, to enforce the exemption of children from industrial employment until a later date and to extend their effective school age appreciably beyond what would once have been sufficient to meet all the commonplace requirements of skilled workmanship.140
The knowledge so required as a general and commonplace equipment requisite for the pursuit of these modern skilled occupations is of the general nature of applied mechanics, in which the essence of the undertaking is a ready apprehension of opaque facts, in passably exact quantitative terms. This class of knowledge presumes a certain intellectual or spiritual attitude on the part of the workman, such an attitude and animus as will readily apprehend and appreciate matter of fact and will guard against the suffusion of this knowledge with putative animistic or anthropomorphic subtleties, quasi-personal interpretations of the observed phenomena and of their relations to one another. The norm of systematisation is that given by the logic of the machine process, and thescope of it is that inculcated by statistical computation and the principle of material cause and effect.
In some degree the routine of the machine industry necessarily induces such an animus in its employees, since such is the scope and method of its own working; and the closer and more exacting the application to work of this kind, the more thorough-going should be the effects of its discipline. But this routine and its discipline extend beyond the mechanical occupations as such, so as in great part to determine the habits of all members of the modern community. This proposition holds true more broadly for the current state of the industrial arts than any similar statement would hold,e. g., for the handicraft system. The ordinary routine of life is more widely and pervasively determined by the machine industry and by machine-like industrial processes today, and this determination is at the same time more rigorous, than any analogous effect that was had under the handicraft system. Within the effective bounds of modern Christendom no one can wholly escape or in any sensible degree deflect the sweep of the machine’s routine.
Modern life goes by clockwork. So much so that no modern household can dispense with a mechanical timepiece; which may be more or less accurate, it is true, but which commonly marks the passage of time with a degree of exactness that would have seemed divertingly supererogatory to the common man of the high tide of handicraft.141Latterly the time so indicated, it should be called to mind, is “standard time,” standardised to coincide over wide areas and to vary only by large and standardunits. It brings the routine of life to a nicely uniform schedule of hours throughout a population which exceeds by many fold the size of those communities that once got along contentedly enough without such an expedient under the régime of handicraft. In this matter the demands of the machine have even brought on a revision of the time schedule imposed by the mechanism of the heavenly bodies, so that not only “solar time,” but even the “mean solar time” that once was considered to be a sufficient improvement on the ways of Nature, has been superseded by the schedule imposed by the railway system.
The discipline of the timepiece is sufficiently characteristic of the discipline exercised by the machine process at large in modern life, and as a cultural factor, as a factor in shaping the habits of thought of the modern peoples, it is itself moreover a fact of the first importance. Of the standardisation of the time schedule just spoken of, the earlier, the adoption of “mean solar time,” was due immediately to the exigencies of the machine process as such, which would not tolerate the seasonal fluctuations of “apparent” solar time. This epithet “apparent,” by the way, carries a suggestion that the time schedule so designated is less true to the actualities of the case than the one which superseded it. And so it is if the actualities to which regard is had are those of the machine process; whereas the contrary is true if the actualities that are to decide are those of the seasons, as they were under the earlier dispensation. “Standard time” has gone into effect primarily through the necessities of railway communication,—itself a dominant item in the mechanical routine of life; but it is only in aless degree a requirement of the other activities that go to make up the traffic of modern life. The railway is one of the larger mechanical contrivances of the machine age, and its exigencies in this respect are typical of what holds true at large. Communication of whatever kind, as well as the supply of other necessaries, is standardised in terms of time, space, quantity, frequency, and indeed in all measurable dimensions; and the “consumer,” as the denizens of these machine-made communities are called, is required to conform to this network of standardisations in his demand and uses of them, on pain of “getting left.” To “get left” is a colloquialism of the machine era and describes the commonest form of privation under the régime of the machine process. It is already a time-worn colloquialism, inasmuch as it is now already some time since the ubiquitous routine of the machine process first impressed on the common man the sinister eventuality covered by the phrase.
The relation in which the consumer, the common man, stands to the mechanical routine of life at large is of much the same nature as that in which the modern skilled workman stands to that detail machine process into which he is dovetailed in the industrial system. To take effectual advantage of what is offered as the wheels of routine go round, in the way of work and play, livelihood and recreation, he must know by facile habituation what is going on and how and in what quantities and at what price and where and when, and for the best effect he must adapt his movements with skilled exactitude and a cool mechanical insight to the nicely balanced moving equilibrium of the mechanical processes engaged. To live—not to say at ease—under the exigencies ofthis machine-made routine requires a measure of consistent training in the mechanical apprehension of things. The mere mechanics of conformity to the schedule of living implies a degree of trained insight and a facile strategy in all manner of quantitative adjustments and adaptations, particularly at the larger centres of population, where the routine is more comprehensive and elaborate.
And here and now, as always and everywhere, invention is the mother of necessity. The complex of technological ways and means grows by increments that come into the scheme by way of improvements, innovations, expedients designed to facilitate, abridge or enhance the work to be done. Any such innovation that fits workably into the technological scheme, and that in any appreciable degree accelerates the pace of that scheme at any point, will presently make its way into general and imperative use, regardless of whether its net ulterior effect is an increase or a diminution of material comfort or industrial efficiency. Such is particularly the case under the current pecuniary scheme of life if the new expedient lends itself to the service of competitive gain or competitive spending; its general adoption then peremptorily takes effect on pain of damage and discomfort to all those who fail to strike the new pace. Each new expedient added to and incorporated in the system offers not only a new means of keeping up with the run of things at an accelerated pace, but also a new chance of getting left out of the running. The point is well seen, e. g., in the current competitive armaments, where equipment is subject to constant depreciation and obsolescence, not through decline or decay, but by virtue of new improvements.So also in the increase and acceleration of advertising that has been going on during the past quarter of a century, due to increased facilities and improved methods in printing, paper-making, and the other industrial arts that contribute to the appliances of publicity.
It is of course not hereby intended to imply that these modern inventions meet no wants but such as they themselves create. It is beyond dispute that such mechanical contrivances, for instance, as the telephone, the typewriter, and the automobile are not only great and creditable technological achievements, but they are also of substantial service. At the same time it is at least doubtful if these inventions have not wasted more effort and substance than they have saved,—that they are to be credited with an appreciable net loss. They are designed to facilitate travel and communication, and such is doubtless their first and obvious effect. But the net result of their introduction need by no means be the same. Their chief use is in the service of business, not of industry, and their great further use is in the furtherance, or rather the acceleration, of obligatory social amenities. As contrivances for the expedition of traffic both in business and in social intercourse their use is chiefly, almost wholly, of a competitive nature; and in the competitive equipment and manœuvres of business and of gentility the same broad principle will be found to apply as applies to competitive armaments and improvements in the technology of warfare. Any technological advantage gained by one competitor forthwith becomes a necessity to all the rest, on pain of defeat. The typewriter is, no doubt, a good and serviceable contrivancefor the expedition of a voluminous correspondence, but there is also no reasonable doubt but its introduction has appreciably more than doubled the volume of correspondence necessary to carry on a given volume of business, or that it has quadrupled the necessary cost of such correspondence. And the expedition of correspondence by stenographer and typewriter has at the same time become obligatory on all business firms, on pain of losing caste and so of losing the confidence of their correspondents. Of the telephone much the same is to be said, with the addition that its use involves a very appreciable nervous strain and its ubiquitous presence conduces to an unremitting nervous tension and unrest wherever it goes. The largest secure result of these various modern contrivances designed to facilitate and abridge travel and communication appears to be an increase of the volume of traffic per unit of outcome, acceleration of the pace and heightening of the tension at which the traffic is carried on, and a consequent increase of nervous disorders and shortening of the effective working life of those engaged in this traffic. But in these matters invention is the mother of necessity, and within the scope of these contrivances for facilitating and abridging labour there is no alternative, and life is not offered on any other terms.142
Other kinds of routine, standardised and elaborate, have been or still are in force, besides this machine-like process of living as carried on under modern technological conditions; and one and another of these will at times rise to a degree of exigence quite comparable with that of the machine process. But these others are of a different character in that their demands are not enforced by sanctions of an unmediated mechanical kind; they do not fall on the delinquent with a direct mechanical impact, and the penalties of non-conformity are of a conventional nature. So,e. g., the punctilios of religious observance may come to a very rigid routine, to be observed on pain of sufficiently grave consequences; but in so far as these eventual (eschatological) consequences are statable in terms of material incidence (of fire, sulphur, or the like) the mechanically trained modern consumer will incline to hold that they are of a putative character only. So, again, in the matter of fashion and decorum the schedule of observances may be sufficiently rigorous, but here too failure to articulate with the sweep of a punctilious routine with all the sure and firm touch of the expert is not checked with an immediate disastrous impact of mechanical shock. Conformity in the technological respect with the routine of living under other technological systems than that of the machine process had also something of this character of conventional prescription; and the discipline exercised by theroutine of living in these more archaic technological eras was also something more in the nature of a training in conventional expedients. The resulting growth of habits of thought in such a community should then also differ in a similar way from what comes in sight in the present.
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Both in its incidence on the workman and on the members of the community at large, therefore, the training given by this current state of the industrial arts is a training in the impersonal, quantitative apprehension and appreciation of things, and it tends strongly to inhibit and discredit all imputation of spiritual traits to the facts of observation. It is a training in matter-of-fact; more specifically it is a training in the logic of the machine process. Its outcome should obviously be an unqualified materialistic and mechanical animus in all orders of society, most pronounced in the working classes, since they are most immediately and consistently exposed to the discipline of the machine process. But such an animus as best comports with the logic of the machine process does not, it appears, for good or ill, best comport with the native strain of human nature in those peoples that are subject to its discipline. In all the various peoples of Christendom there is a visible straining against the drift of the machine’s teaching, rising at time and in given classes of the population to the pitch of revulsion.
It is apparently among the moderately well-to-do, the half-idle classes, that such a revulsion chiefly has its way; leading now and again to fantastic, archaising cults and beliefs and to make-believe credence in occultinsights and powers. At the same time, and with the like tincture of affectation and make-believe, there runs through much of the community a feeling of maladjustment and discomfort, that seeks a remedy in a “return to Nature” in one way or another; some sort of a return to “the simple life,” which shall in some fashion afford an escape from the unending “grind” of living from day to day by the machine method and shall so put behind us for a season the burdensome futilities by help of which alone life can be carried on under the routine of the machine process.
All this uneasy revulsion may not be taken at its face value; there is doubtless a variable but fairly large element of affectation that comes to expression in all this talk about the simple life; but when all due abatement has been allowed there remains a substantial residue of unaffected protest. The pitch and volume of this protest against “artificial” and “futile” ways of life is greatest in the advanced industrial countries, and it has been growing greater concomitantly with the advance of the machine era. What is perhaps more significant of actualities than these well-bred professions of discomfort and discontent is the “vacation,” being a more tangible phenomenon and statable in quantitative terms. The custom of “taking a vacation” has been on the increase for some time, and the avowed need of a yearly or seasonal holiday greatly exceeds the practice of it in nearly all callings. This growing recourse to vacations should be passably conclusive evidence to the effect that neither the manner of life enforced by the machine system, nor the occupations of those who are in close contact with this technology and its due habitsof thought, can be “natural” to the common run of civilised mankind.
According to accepted theories of heredity,143civilised mankind should by native endowment be best fit to live under conditions of a moderately advanced savagery, such as the machine technology will not permit.144Neither in the physical conditions which it imposes, therefore, nor in the habitual ways of observation and reasoning which it requires in the work to be done, is the machine age adapted to the current native endowment of the race. And these various movements of unrest and revulsion are evidence, for as much as they are worth, that such is the case.
Not least convincing is the fact that a considerable proportion of those who are held unremittingly to the service of the machine process “break down,” fall into premature decay. Physically and spiritually these modern peoples are better adapted to life under conditions radically different from those imposed by this modern technology.145All of which goes to show, what is thepoint here in question, that however exacting and however pervasive the discipline of the machine process may be, it can not, after all, achieve its perfect work in the way of habituation in the population of Christendom as it stands. The limit of tolerance native to the race, physically and spiritually, is short of that unmitigated materialism and unremitting mechanical routine to which the machine technology incontinently drives.
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For anything like a comprehensive view of the effects which the machine technology has had on the scope and method of knowledge in modern times it is necessary to turn back to its beginnings. Historically the machine age succeeds the era of handicraft, but the two overlap very extensively. So much so that while the era of the machine technology is commonly held to have set in something like a century and a half ago it is still too early to assert that the industrial system has cleareditself of the remnants of handicraft or that the habits of thought suitable to the days of handicraft are no longer decisive in the current legal and popular apprehension of industrial relations. The discipline of the machine process has not yet had time, nor has it had a clear field. The best that can be looked for, therefore, in the way of habits of thought conforming to the ways and means of the machine process should be something of a progressive approximation; and the considerations recited in the last few paragraphs should leave it doubtful whether anything more than an imperfect approximation to the logic of the machine process can be achieved, through any length of training, by the peoples among whom the greatest advance in that direction has already been made.
The material sciences early show the bias of the machine technology, as is fairly to be expected, since these sciences stand in a peculiarly close relation to the technological side of industry,—almost a relation of affiliation. At no earlier period has the correlation between science and technology been so close. And the response in respect of the scope and method of these sciences to any notable advance in technology has been sufficiently striking. As has already been indicated above, modern science at large takes to the use of statistical methods and precise mechanical measurements, and in this matter scientific inquiry has grown continually more confident and more meticulous at the same time that this mechanistic procedure is continually being applied more extensively as the technological advance goes forward. How far this statistical-mechanistic bias of modern inquiry is to be set down to the account of the drift oftechnology toward mechanical engineering, and how far it may be due to an ever increasing familiarity with conceptions of accountancy enforced by the price system and the time schedule in daily life, may be left an open question. The main fact remains, that in much the same degree as niceties of calculation have come to dominate current technological methods and devices the like insistence on extreme niceties of mechanical measurement and statistical accuracy has also become imperative in scientific inquiry; until it may fairly be said that such meticulous scrutiny of quantitative relations as would have seemed foolish in the early days of the machine era has become the chief characteristic of scientific inquiry today.146It is of course not overlooked that in this matter of quantitative scruple the relation between current technology and the sciences is a relation of mutual give and take; but this fact can scarcely be urged as an objection to the view that these two lines of expression of the modern habit of mind are closely bound together, since it is precisely such a bond of continuity between the two that is here spoken for.
As shown in the foregoing chapter, in the course of the transition to modern times and modern ways of thinking the principle of efficient cause gradually replaced that of sufficient reason as the final ground of certitude in conclusions of a theoretical nature. This shifting of the metaphysical footing of knowledge from a subjective ground to an objective one first and most unreservedly affects the material sciences, as it shouldif it is at all to be construed as an outcome of the discipline exercised by the then current technology of handicraft. But the like effect is presently, though tardily, had in other lines of systematic knowledge that lie farther from the immediate incidence of technology and secular traffic. So that by the time of the industrial revolution the like mechanistic animus had come to pervade even the philosophical and theological speculations current in those communities that were most intimately and unreservedly touched by the discipline of craftsmanship and the petty trade.147
By this time,—the latter part of the eighteenth century,—the material sciences (overtly) admit no principle of systematisation within their own jurisdiction other than that of efficient cause. But at that date the concept of causation still has much of the content given it by the technology of handicraft. The efficient cause is still conceived after an individualistic fashion; without grave exaggeration it might even be said that the concept of cause as currently employed in the scientific speculations of that time had something of a quasi-personal complexion. The inquiry habitually looked to some one efficient cause, engaged as creatively dominant in the case and working to its end under conditioning circumstancesthat might greatly affect the outcome but that were not felt (or avowed) to enter into the case with the same aggressive thrust of causality that belonged to the efficient cause proper. The “contributory circumstances” were conceived rather extrinsically as accessory to the event; “accessory before the fact,” perhaps, but none the less accessory. And scientific research took the form of an inquiry into the causal nexus between an antecedent (a cause or complex of causes) and its outcome in an event. The inquiry looked to the beginning and end of an episode of activity, the outcome of which would be a finished product, somewhat after the fashion in which a finished piece of work leaves the craftsman’s hands. The craftsman is the agency productively engaged in the case, while his tools and materials are accessories to his force and skill, and the finished goods leave his hands as an end achieved; and so an episode of creative efficiency is rounded off.
From an early period in the machine era a new attitude toward questions of causation comes in evidence in scientific inquiry. The obvious change is perhaps the larger scale on which the sequence of cause and effect is conceived. It is no longer predominantly a question of episodes of causal efficiency, detached and rounded off. Such detail episodes still continue to occupy the routine of investigation; necessarily so, since these empirical sciences proceed step by step in the determination of the phenomena with which they are occupied. But in an increasing degree these detached phenomena are sought to be worked into a theoretical structure of larger scope, and this larger structure of theory falls into shape as a self-determining sequence of cumulative change.The same concept of process that rules in the machine technology invades the speculations of the scientists and results in theories of cumulative sequence, in which the point of departure as well as the objective end of the sequence of causation gradually come to have less and less of a determinative significance for the course of the inquiry and for its results. In theoretical speculations based on the data of the empirical sciences, interest and attention come progressively to centre on this process of cumulative causation, so that the interest in the productive efficiency of consummation ceases gradually to be of decisive moment in the formulations of theory; which comes in this way to be an account of an unfolding process rather than a checking up of individual effects against individual causes. What once were ultimate questions have in modern science become ulterior questions and have lost their preferential place in the inquiry. Neither the seat of efficient initiative, that would be presumed to give this unfolding process of cumulative change its content and direction, nor its eventual goal, wherein it would be presumed to come to rest when the initial impulse has spent itself and its end has been compassed,—neither of these ultimates holds the attention or guides the inquiry of modern science.
It is only gradually, concomitant with the gradual maturing of the machine technology, that the systematisation of knowledge in scientific theory has come by common consent to converge on formulations of a genetic process of cumulative change. This science of the machine age is “evolutionary” in a peculiarly impersonal, indeed in a mechanistic sense of the term. In the consummate form, as it stands at the transition to the twentiethcentury, this evolutionary conception of genetic process is, at least ideally, void of all teleological elements and of all personality—except as personality may be concessively admitted as a by-product of the mechanistic sweep of the blind motions of brute matter. Neither the name nor the notion of a genetic evolution is peculiar to the machine age; but this current, impersonal, unteleological, mechanistic conception of an evolutionary process is peculiar to the late modern fashion of apprehending things.
It goes without saying that this mechanistic conception of process has worked clear of personation and teleological bias only gradually, by insensible decay and progressive elimination of those preconceptions of personal force and teleological fitness that ruled all theoretical knowledge in the days when the principle of sufficient reason held over that of efficient cause; and it should likewise be a matter of course that this shift to the mechanistic footing is by no means yet complete, that scientific inquiry is not yet clear of all contamination with animistic, anthropomorphic, or teleological elements; since the change is of the nature of habit, which takes time, and since the discipline of modern life to which the mechanistic habit of mind is traceable is by no means wholly consistent or unqualified in its mechanistic drift. Yet so far has the habituation to mechanistic ways of thinking taken effect, and so comprehensive and thorough has the discipline of the machine process been, that a mechanistic, unteleological notion of evolution is today a commonplace preconception both with scientists and laymen; whereas a hundred years ago such a conceit had intimately touched theimagination of but very few, if any, among the scientific adepts of the new era.
To what effect Lucretius and his like in classical antiquity,e. g., may have speculated and tried to speak in these premises is by no means easy to make out; nor does it concern the present inquiry, since no vital connection or continuity of habit is traceable between their achievements in this respect and the theoretical preconceptions of modern science or of the machine technology. In the course of modern times conceptions of an evolutionary sequence of creation or of genesis come up with increasing frequency, and from an early period in the machine age these conceptions take on more and more of a mechanistic character, but it is not until Darwin that such a genetic process of evolution is conceived in terms of blind mechanical forces alone, without the help of imputed teleological bias or personalised initiative. It may perhaps be an open question whether the Darwinian conception of evolution is in no degree contaminated with teleological fancies, but however that may be it remains true that a purely mechanistic conception of a genetic process in nature had found no lodgment in scientific theory up to the middle of the nineteenth century. With varying success this conception has since been assimilated by the adepts of all the material sciences, and it may even be said to stand as a tacitly postulated commonplace underlying all modern scientific theory, whether in the material or the social sciences. It is accepted by common consent as a matter of course, although doubtless much antique detail at variance with it stands over both in the theoretical formulations of the adepts and in popular thought, and must continueto stand over until the course of habituation may conceivably in time enforce the sole competency of this mechanistic conception as the definitive norm of systematic knowledge. Whether such an eventuality is to overtake the scope and method of knowledge in Western civilisation should apparently be a question of how protracted, consistent, unmitigated, and how far congruous with their native bent the discipline of the machine process may prove in the further history of these peoples.