We have spoken of the eighteenth-century mind as living in a “clockwork” cosmos, and it is interesting to reflect that even this simplest form of mechanical contrivance was a thing quite unknown to the ancient world. Was the rhythmical mimicry of organic life, which is the characteristic of machinery, already having its unperceived effect on men’s minds and philosophies? The influences which go to make up the outlook of an age are sometimes seen working most powerfully—though beneath the surface—in the very minds which believe themselves to be combating that outlook most stubbornly. The closing years of the eighteenth century produced Paley’s famous watch, a popular cosmic allegory which, in proving the existence of a Creator, at the same time relegates all His activities to the remote past. But this is a subject which can be more usefully considered in the next chapter. Thither we must now turn in order to trace the further development of the eighteenth-century gentleman’s imaginative double life—his life in the order and reason of the moral and material universe and of “sensibility” in the little universe of himself—into two divergent directions.
CHAPTER X
MECHANISM
Automatic. Spring. Species. Cause. Agnostic. Unction. Spiritualism. Humanitarianism.
“The material universe is the complement of the intellect, and without the study of its laws reason would never have awoke to its higher forms of self-consciousness at all. It is the non-ego, through and by which the ego is endowed with self-discernment.”—Tyndall: Fragments of Science.
“Whatever else a child may be, in respect of this particular question [respiration], it is a complicated piece of mechanism, built up out of materials supplied by its mother; and in the course of such building-up, provided with a set of motors—the muscles. Each of these muscles contains a stock of substance capable of yielding energy under certain conditions, one of which is a change of state in the nerve fibres connected with it. The powder in a loaded gun is such another stock of substance capable of yielding energy in consequence of a change of state in the mechanism of the lock....
“The infant is launched into altogether new surroundings; and these operate through the mechanism of the nervous machinery, with the result that the potential energy of some of the work-stuff in the muscles which bring about inspiration is suddenly converted into actual energy; and this, operating through the mechanism of the respiratory apparatus, gives rise to an act of inspiration. As the bullet is propelled by the ‘going-off’ of the powder, so it might be said that the ribs are raised and the midriff depressed by the ‘going-off’ of certain portions of muscular work-stuff.”—Huxley: Science and Morals.
The two most interesting points about the above passage are firstly, that it was written, not by an engineer, but by a natural scientist; and secondly, that the title of the essay from which it is taken is Capital and Labour. That is to say, the abundance of mechanical simile in it is neither the natural colouring of an imagination subdued to what it works in, nor a deliberate system of metaphors fabricated with the object of figuring forth a biological process to the uninitiated. On the contrary, the notion of child-birth is itself only introduced for the purpose of illustration. The images by which it is conveyed are thus revealed as the natural furniture of the writer’s imagination. They can no longer have been images to him, but rather his normal outlook on the chain of facts in which he was most interested; and the passage is, of course, only one of thousands in which we can see nineteenth-century imagination working in a similar way.
It would be of small general interest to give a list of all the mechanical and technical words which had come into our vocabulary since the middle of the seventeenth century—words like calculus, centrifugal, dynamic, galvanize, inertia, momentum, oscillate, polarity, reciprocating, rotate, vibrate (except in the sense ‘to brandish’),[55]... We are concerned more with their influence on the meanings of older words. And from this point of view the passage quoted from Huxley can indeed give us a fair idea of the untold changes that were secretly brewing when, for instance, the word mechanic (Greek ‘mēchanē’, a ‘device’, or ‘contrivance’) lost its old meaning of ‘pertaining to manual labour’, and began to be applied to machines. This happened in the seventeenth century, when also the word machine, which had formerly been used of plots and intrigues, or for any kind of erection, was first used with its modern meaning. We begin to hear of the six “Mechanick Faculties” or “Simple Machines”, i.e. the Balance, Lever, Pulley, Screw, Wedge, and Wheel; and in a little book called Mathematicall Magick, by Bishop Wilkins, one of the first members of the Royal Society, these are discussed with great enthusiasm and many respectful references to Aristotle. It is in the same work that we first hear in English of a science of Mechanics. This new science, foreshadowed to some extent by Aristotle, from whose treatise with that title we take the word, had quickly been carried farther by his successor, Archimedes. Most civilizations seem to have produced towards their close mechanical devices of one kind or another, but more especially “engines” of war. What distinguishes our own is the way in which mechanism has gradually entered into our outlook—a fact which is marked, among other things, by our use of the Greek prefix ‘auto-’ (self) for things worked by machinery. In a Greek dictionary we find upwards of two hundred words beginning with this prefix, but not one of them is applied to anything mechanical.
Let us consider the word automatic. The Greek ‘automatos’, which meant ‘self-moved’,[56] was Latinized in the form ‘automatus’ at about the beginning of our era, and automatous—now obsolete—is actually found in the works of the seventeenth-century writer, Sir Thomas Browne. This old adjective had the sense of “spontaneous”, “of one’s own free will”, and was used of the animal and vegetable worlds as opposed to the mineral, or of events which came about “by chance”; while in Plato’s philosophy the distinction between that which is “self-moved”, and that which can only be moved by something outside itself had been taken as the very antithesis between spirit and matter, between eternal and perishable. Automatic is first found in English in the eighteenth century. The earliest quotation given by the Oxford Dictionary is taken from David Hartley, who wrote in 1748: