Hephæstus

by E. E. Fournier d'Albe

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.