“The motions of the body are of two kinds, automatic and voluntary. The automatic motions are those which arise from the mechanism of the body in an evident manner. They are called automatic from their resemblance to the motions of automata, or machines, whose principle of motion is within themselves. Of this kind are the motions of the heart and peristaltic motion of the bowels.”
In 1802 Paley pointed out “the difference between an animal and an automatic statue”, and sixty years later a writer on physics, after speaking of the amoeba as being “irritable and automatic”, added a note to the effect that—
Automatic ... has recently acquired a meaning almost exactly opposite to that which it originally bore, and an automatic action is now by many understood to mean nothing more than an action produced by some machinery or other. In this work I use it in the older sense, as denoting an action of a body, the causes of which appear to lie in the body itself.
The reason for this semantic volte face may perhaps be detected in the history of the parallel word automaton. This had long ago (about 10 B.C.) been applied to the few primitive mechanical devices which Aryan civilization had then evolved, and its appearance in English seems to have preceded that of automatic by nearly two centuries, as it is found in 1611 describing “a picture of a gentlewoman” made with eyes that open and shut. Then, later on in the same century, it began to be applied to clocks and watches, and there seems every reason to suppose that the presence of this particular kind of apparent “self-mover” on so many mantelpieces and in so many vest-pockets must have determined the peculiarly dead and mechanical meaning which automatic now possesses.
The ancients measured time by the regulated flow of water. Striking clocks of some kind were known in Europe as far back as the twelfth or thirteenth century. But they seem to have been unreliable, costly, and rare until the discovery by Galileo of the “isochronism” of pendulums. Pendulum is first found in 1660, in Boyle’s writings, vibrate and vibration in 1667. The new toy seems to have taken hold of Europe’s imagination in the most extraordinary way. Both clockwork and mainspring were used figuratively the first time they are known to have been used in English at all, a sixteenth-century writer even anticipating Paley so far as to write:
God’s the main spring, that maketh every way
All the small wheels of this great Engin play.
We hear talk almost at once of the springs[57] of people’s actions. Descartes compared the souls of brutes to watches, and Leibnitz actually compared the souls and bodies of men to two watches! It seems as though the works had started going in our heads.
And since then, so far from stopping, they have accelerated, especially during the last century—to what extent it is difficult for us to realize fully, simply because it has all happened so recently. Differences of outlook on such matters as biology and physiology between ourselves and the Middle Ages we readily perceive, though we may not properly understand them; here we stand a long way off, and can often see quite plainly how the old words have altered their meanings. But from the way in which our great grandfathers used such words as energy, midriff, motor, muscle, nerve, respiration, work—to take examples only from the passage quoted at the beginning of [this chapter]—we sometimes find it hard, even when we have traced the history of their meanings up to that date, to feel what different associations they must have called up to the generations which died before Huxley was born. At this time, thirty years after his death, it is only our own imagination, working introspectively on such a phrase as “nervous machinery”, and grasping, as it can do, how the meanings of the two words have been running into one another, which can bring this difference before us. When it has done so, we are again reminded of the simple yet striking truth that all knowledge which has been conveyed by means of speech to the reason has travelled in metaphors taken from man’s own activities and from the solid things which he handles. The present is no different from the past. Only the metaphors get buried deeper and deeper beneath one another; they interact more subtly, and do not always leave any outward trace on the language. It would be interesting, for example, were it possible, to discover just how much of the average man’s idea of blood circulation is due to the invention of that elementary mechanical device, the pump;[58] or how much of the mental image which he has formed of the interaction of muscle, nerve, and brain would fade from his consciousness if there were no such thing as the electric telegraph.
We think by means of words, and we have to use the same ones for so many different thoughts that as soon as new meanings have entered into one set, they creep into all our theories and begin to mould our whole cosmos; and from the theories they pass into more words, and so into our lives and institutions. Thus, not only were the Newtonian heavens the playground of just those forces which had been used for the working of the six “simple machines”, but Montesquieu insists that the English Whigs copied the new astronomy when they were creating the modern British Constitution. Referring to this in one of his essays, Woodrow Wilson drew attention to the fact that the Constitution of the United States had been made on the same principle. “They [writers in the Federalist] speak of the checks and balances of the Constitution,” he said, “and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system....” And we notice that the late President, when he went on to speak of reconstructing the Constitution, was fain to lean on another analogy, reminding his hearers that government is “not a machine, but a living thing”; that it is “modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life”; and again that it is a body of men “with highly differentiated functions”. In fact, we are merely launched into another set of metaphors, of which, however, the speaker is in this case conscious, for he explicitly affirms that government is “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton”.