II
Man is an animal who laughs and cooks.
When Prometheus had caught some sparks from the chariot of the sun and brought them safely to earth, hidden in a tube, there was consternation on Mount Olympus. The Conservative Government of that privileged stronghold trembled for its celestial prerogatives. It was all very well, they said, for Hephæstus to blow his bellows in his workshop and produce beautiful things for Olympians, so long as he did it under proper supervision. But fire, once brought to earth, would set the whole world ablaze and consume them in their palaces.
Hephæstus himself was not perturbed. Remembering the kindness he met with on Lemnos after his brutal expulsion from the company of the gods, he secretly sympathized with Prometheus and his race, and planned a closer co-operation with mankind. His Sicilian workshops saw him oftener than before, hobbling about among his furnaces and experimenting with every kind of ore and ingot. Wherever he went, whether among gods or men, his kindness and his merry humour made him a general favourite.
Although he often made weapons, he much preferred to make tools and ornaments. Among the Olympians, his strangely begotten “sister” Athene was his closest ally. Like him, she favoured the arts of peace rather than those of war, and despised the noisy and swashbuckling Ares. When Athene went to take up her abode in her Parthenon at Athens, he forsook Olympus and removed his furnaces to Lipari, off the Sicilian coast. And it was in Sicily, some centuries later, that his great disciple Archimedes was born, the man who was fitted and destined to establish the reign of Hephæstus in spite of the strenuous opposition of the Roman republic and its subsequent imperial and ecclesiastical successors.
When man was endowed with fire he received the gift without knowing whence it came or what it meant. Greek mythology, with its deep insight into unseen things, presents us Helios, the sun-god, as a friend of Hephæstus, the god of fire. We moderns express the same truth differently. We say that all fire on earth is ultimately derived from the sun. Archimedes kindled fires—preferably in Roman ships—by means of concave mirrors which condensed the heat of the sun to a focus. The fuel for the fires was also provided by the heat of the sun, absorbed by the chlorophyll of the leaves in the forest and used to build up combustible wood and other products. The firing of the wood reversed the process of accumulation of solar energy and provided light and heat by day and by night, independently of the sun, the original giver. For a hundred million years already had the sun shone on a habitable earth, pouring out its light and heat and nourishing the luxuriant vegetation which covered most of the globe. For untold ages had the plants stored up the sunlight for some unknown end. That end became manifest when Prometheus kindled the first fire and made a new realm accessible to man. Till then, mankind had undergone the annual and daily vicissitudes of heat and cold due to the days and the seasons, but he had not controlled them. When he acquired the mastery of fire, he was enabled to wander north and south and take with him in his brazier the accustomed heat of the tropics.
But there was more to come. The invention of pottery—another great epoch—enabled him to create a solar furnace on a small scale. It enabled him to create a miniature world where the heat was much greater than in his own world. He soon found that plants and animals, passed through this new world, became richer and more palatable, and in many ways better adapted to his digestive system. It must have seemed highly “unnatural” at first to accelerate the ripening of fruits and predigest animal food by plunging them into water in which no living thing could survive, but the departure from the habits of the animal world, once begun, was never arrested, and it is still proceeding in our own day.
Our remote progenitors must have looked upon the guardians of their fires with much the same awe as that which mediæval people felt for sorcerers and alchemists, and with rather more justification. For man had everything to learn about the new power placed in his hands. He was beginning to find his way about a new world in which the ordinary laws of Nature were suspended. Water was no longer cold and wet in that world. It was hot as the sun and thin as smoke. It no longer flowed but rose in the air. Salt rapidly became invisible in it, but could as rapidly be recovered by adding more fire. There was as much to learn about fire as there was about X-rays in 1895 and about “atmospherics” to-day.
The possession of fire turned winter into summer and night into day. It lengthened the life-time of its fortunate possessors. But it did much more than that. It endowed mankind with a number of gifts which must, in his primitive condition, have appeared to him as supernatural. It gave him substances which combined the hardness of stone with the toughness of wood. It enabled him to mould these substances into any desired shape by the softening action of excessive heat. Hephæstus himself cast his products in bronze, having cunningly mixed copper with tin in order to produce an alloy combining hardness with ductility. But he and his later disciples found the perfect substance in iron, which, though requiring an extreme degree of heat, yielded weapons and tools of unsurpassed power and strength.
And thus it was that Hephæstus and his human allies prepared that career of conquest which eventually swept over the earth and made all things new. The unprogressive Zeus, content with having learnt how to shake Olympus with a nod of his head, perished in the flood of new ideas from the East. Hephæstus, alone of all that shining company, had established a firm footing in the world. For the work of his hands had trained his brain and enabled it to build up a scheme of the cosmos in which every detail corresponded to some ascertained reality. And so, while Egyptian priests were speculating about the weight of a soul, while Hindu sects were vying with each other in producing the most hideous idols, and while Christian theologians were endeavouring to prove that three ones make one, Hephæstus and his followers were engaged in founding that superb edifice of knowledge which was destined to outlast the fall of empires and the dark ages which followed the eclipse of classical learning.
But even as late as 1800 A.D., in spite of the mariner’s compass, the printing press, and gunpowder, the ground won by Hephæstus was very small. The postal services in Europe were inferior to that of the Cæsars, there was no telegraphic system equal to that of the ancient Persians, and the most stately sailing ship barely excelled the classical trireme. The fruits of the work of Newcomen and Watt and Papin had not yet blossomed. When they did come forth, things happened swiftly. Fire was made to generate steam, and steam, in the course of a century, transformed the world. The motive-power being there, it was put to a million uses. The Wheel became the most important of mechanical contrivances. Now a wheel is a thing which, in the organic world, is simply impossible. In the days when microscopes were of feeble power, it was thought that the “wheel animalcule,” called Vorticella, had small wheels revolving on the rim of its opening to gather in the floating food particles. But higher magnifying power showed that the appearance was an illusion created by the oscillation of the fine hairs fixed round the aperture. A wheel revolving on a shaft implies a separation which precludes all organic connection. Had it been otherwise, an animal running on its own wheels would have made its appearance on earth long ago. The shaft of the steam engine could be provided with numerous pulleys, each capable of driving a machine connected with it by a belt. Then arose that marvellous crop of mechanical combinations which brought about the age of mechanism, combinations which, in the last resort, can be reduced to sliding couples and turning couples, and can be catalogued by means of formulæ, like words in a dictionary. So numerous were these inventions, so widespread was their use, and so great their effect on the minds of those generations, that a great illusion arose which coloured the philosophies of a whole century and has left traces even in modern times. People became so accustomed to the perfect functioning of a machine or a clock, so impressed with its regularity and intelligible complexity, that they began to look upon mechanism as a primary thing capable of “explaining” many non-mechanical things, not excluding the phenomena of life. Why should not man himself, the inventor of machinery, be a machine? If any functions of his body seemed beyond explanation on mechanical lines, might this not be solely due to their great complexity?
In a recent article in Nature, Professor Fraser Harris puts the matter tersely as follows:
“Because the stomach ‘works’ rhythmically and predictably we may call it a machine for turning out pepsin from blood and liken it to a machine for turning out (say) newspapers, but the secretion of pepsin is not mechanical, nor is the output of newspapers vital.”
The strangest point about the materialistic or mechanistic conception of things is that every machine without exception has an inherent purpose and design. It is intended by its inventor to do certain definite things in a certain definite way. If an animal, therefore, is a machine, it must have a design and purpose, and presumably a designer. But the main idea underlying the mechanistic hypothesis was to eliminate the idea of purpose altogether, and reduce the universe to an accidental configuration of lifeless atoms.
It is difficult to see how this attempt to reverse the rôle of Potter and Pot could ever have satisfied enquiring and well-balanced minds, but it is a fact that mechanistic views of life, after a period of almost general acceptance, are still prevalent among biologists whose education in the principles of logic has been somewhat hurried.
The majority, however, have returned to the saner view that it is useless to explain the known by the less known. Human purpose is a primary fact of experience, and the embodiment of a human purpose in a tool or machine is a process which cannot be denied on any reasonable grounds. Now, a “purpose” is a datum of the mind, which cannot be reduced to any simpler elements. The purpose of a machine is the psychical element embodied in it. Briefly, we may call it the “soul of the machine.” Every machine has a psychical element, a purpose, a “soul.” It is therefore, simpler, more in accordance with sound philosophical principles, more direct and “economical” to explain machines in terms of psychology than to explain human bodies in terms of mechanism.
The victories of Hephæstus are victories of mind over matter. The “mechanical age,” which to some appears as the very negation of the soul, is, on the contrary, the age of supreme psychical achievement.
Science and invention are for ever annexing fresh regions of the universe and subjecting them to the free play of our mental faculties. The process of bringing material things into subjection to our will is a process of sublimation, which does not drag us down to the dust, but raises up dust into the realms of immortal spirit.