The consequences of this habitual attitude, for the technology of the machine era that presently follows, are worth noting. The mechanical inventions and expedients that lead over from the era of handicraft, through what has been called the industrial revolution, to the later system of large industry, bear the marks of their handicraft origin. The early devices of the machine industry are uniformly contrivances for performing by mechanical means the same motions which the craftsmen in the given industries performed by hand and by man power; in great part, indeed, they set out with being contrivances to enable the workmen to perform the same manual operation in duplicate or multiple—(as in the early spinning and weaving machinery) or to perform a given operation with larger effect than was possible to the unaided muscular work (as in the beginnings of steam power). In their beginnings the new mechanical appliances are conceived as improved tools, which extend the reach and power of the workman or which facilitate or lighten the manual operations in which he spends himself. They are, as they aim to be, labour saving devices, designed to further the workmanlike efficiency of the men in whose hands they are placed.
The early history of steam power shows how closely this workmanlike conception limited the range of invention. It was first employed to pump water out of mines. In this use the pressure of the air on a piston, in a low-pressure cylinder, was brought to bear on a lever so suspended as to yield formally the same motion as a like lever previously moved by human muscle. After a long interval, sufficiently long to make the use of this intermittent pressure and the resulting reciprocating motion familiar and impersonal in men’s habitual apprehension, the reciprocating motion was turned to use to produce a rotary motion,—after the fashion suggested by the treadle of a lathe or spinning wheel, which was already familiar enough to have been divested of something of that fog of personality that had doubtless surrounded it at its first invention.[125] The next serious move in the development of the steam engine is the invention of the automatic valves, for admission and escape of steam from the cylinder. According to the ancient myth, a boy whose work it was to shift the valves by hand, contrived to connect them by cords with the moving parts of the machine in such a way as to lift them at the proper moment by the motion of the machine itself; so making the machine perform what had in the original concept of the valve mechanism been a manual operation. Later still, after the due interval for externalisation and assimilation of this mechanical valve movement as an impersonal fact of the machine process, further improvement and elaboration of the elements so gained has worked out in the highly finished mechanism familiar to later times.
Detail scrutiny of any one of the greater mechanical inventions, or series of inventions, will bring out something of the same character as is seen in the sequence of successive gains that make up the history of the steam engine. It is to be noted in this connection that time appears to be of the essence of the process of mechanical invention in any field; so much so, indeed, that it will commonly be found that any single inventor contributes but one radical innovation in any one particular connection; which may then presently be taken up again as a securely objective element by a later inventor and pushed forward by a new move as radical as that to which this original invention owed its origin. This time interval which plays such a part in mechanical inventions appears necessary only as an interval of habituation, for the due externalisation of the element, to relieve it, by neglect, of the personal equation with which it is contaminated as it first comes into use, and so to leave it such an objective concept as may be turned to account as mere technological raw material.
It appears, then, that the accumulation of technological experience is not of itself sufficient to bring out a consecutive improvement of the industrial arts, particularly not such an advance in the industrial arts as is embodied in the machine technology of late-modern times. In this modern machine technology the ruling norm is the highly impersonal, not to say brutal, concept of mechanical process, blind and irresponsible. The logic of this technology, accordingly, is the logic of the machine process,—a logic of masses, velocities, strains and thrusts, not of personal dexterity, tact, training, and routine. In the degree in which the information that comes to hand comes encumbered with a teleological bias, a connotation of personal bent, it is unavailable or refractory under this logic. But all new information is infused with such an anthropomorphic colouring of personality; which may presently decay and give place to a more objective habitual apprehension of the facts in case use and wont play up the mechanical character and bearing of these facts in subsequent experience of them; or which may on the other hand end by giving its definitive character and value to the acquired information in case it should happen that the facts of experience are by use and wont bent to an habitual anthropomorphic rating and employment. To serve the needs of this machine technology, therefore, the information which accumulates must in some measure be divested of its naïve personal colouring by use and wont; and the degree in which this effect is had is a measure of the degree of availability of the resulting facts for the uses of the machine technology. The larger the available body of information of this character, and the more comprehensive and unremitting the share taken by the discipline of the machine process in the routine of daily life, therefore, the greater, other things equal, will be the rate of advance in the technological mastery of mechanical facts.
But much else goes to the make-up of use and wont besides the routine of industry and the utilisation of those mechanical processes and that output of goods which the modern machine industry places at men’s disposal. To put the same thing in terms already employed in another connection, the sense of workmanship is still subject to contamination with other impulsive elements of human nature working under the constraining limitations imposed by divers conventional canons and principles of conduct; besides being constantly subject to self-contamination in the way of an anthropomorphic interpretation that construes the facts of experience in terms of a craftsmanlike bent.
As bearing on the effectual reach of this self-contamination of the sense of workmanship it is pertinent to recall that craftsmanship ran within a class, and so had the benefit of that accentuated sentiment of self-complacency that comes of class consciousness. From its beginnings down to the period of its dissolution the handicraft industry is an affair of the lower classes; and, as is well known, class feeling runs strong throughout the era, particularly through the centuries of its best development. Whether their conceit is wholly a naïve self-complacency or partly a product of affectation, the sentiment is well in evidence and marks the attitude of the handicraft community with a characteristic bias. The craftsmen habitually rate themselves as serviceable members of the community and contrast themselves in this respect with the other orders of society who are not occupied with the production of things serviceable for human use. To the creative workman who makes things with his hands belongs an efficiency and a merit of a peculiarly substantial and definitive kind, he is the type and embodiment of efficiency and serviceability. The other orders of society and other employments of time and effort may of course be well enough in their way, but they lack that substantial ground of finality which the craftsman in his genial conceit arrogates to himself and his work. And so good a case does the craftsman make out on this head, and so convincingly evident is the efficiency of the skilled workman, and so patent is his primacy in the industrial community, that by the close of the era much the same view has been accepted by all orders of society.
Such a bias pervading the industrial community must greatly fortify the native bent to construe all facts of observation in anthropomorphic terms. But the training given by the petty trade of the handicraft era, on the other hand, is not altogether of this character. The itinerant merchant’s huckstering, as well as the buying and selling in which all members of the community were concerned, would doubtless throw the personal strain into the foreground and would act to keep the self-regarding sentiments alert and active and accentuate an individualistic appreciation of men and things. But the habit of rating things in terms of price has no such tendency, and the price concept gains ground throughout the period. Wherever the handicraft system reaches a fair degree of development the daily life of the community comes to centre about the market and to take on the character given by market relations. The volume of trade grows greater, and purchase and sale enter more thoroughly into the details of the work to be done and of the livelihood to be got by this work. The price system comes into the foreground. With the increase of traffic, book-keeping comes into use among the merchants; and as fast as the practice of habitual recourse to the market grows general, the uncommercial classes also become familiar with the rudimentary conceptions of book-keeping, even if they do not make much use of formal accounts in their own daily affairs.[126]
The logic and concepts of accountancy are wholly impersonal and dispassionate; and whether men’s use of its logic and concepts takes the elaborate form of a set of books or the looser fashion of an habitual rating of gains, losses, income, and outgo in terms of price, its effect is unavoidably in some degree to induce a statistical habit of mind. It makes immediately for an exact quantitative apprehension of all things and relations that have a pecuniary bearing; and more remotely, by force of the pervasive effect of habituation, it makes for a greater readiness to apprehend all facts in a similarly objective and statistical fashion, in so far as the facts admit of a quantitative rating. Accountancy is the beginning of statistics, and the price concept is a type of the objective impersonal, quantitative apprehension of things. Coincidently, because they do not lend themselves to this facile rating, facts that will not admit of a quantitative statement and statistical handling decline in men’s esteem, considered as facts, and tend in some degree to lose the cogency which belongs to empirical reality. They may even come to be discounted as being of a lower order of reality, or may even be denied factual value.
Doubtless, the price system had much to do with the rise of the machine technology in modern times; not only in that the accountancy of price offered a practical form and method of statistical computation, such as is indispensable to anything that may fairly be classed as engineering, but also and immediately and substantially in that its discipline has greatly conduced to the apprehension of mechanical facts in terms not coloured by an imputed anthropomorphic bent. It has probably been the most powerful factor acting positively in early modern times to divest mechanical facts of that imputed workmanlike bent given them by habits of thought induced by the handicrafts.
This reduction of the facts of observation to quantitative and objective terms is perhaps most visible not in the changes that come over the technology of industry directly, in early modern times, but rather in that growth of material science that runs along as a concomitant of the expansion of the mechanical industry during the later era of handicraft. The material sciences, particularly those occupied with mechanical phenomena, are closely related to the technology of the mechanical industries, both in their subject matter and in the scope and method of the systematisation of knowledge at which they aim; and it is in these material sciences that the concomitance is best seen, at the same time that it is the advance achieved in these sciences that most unequivocally marks the transition from mediæval to modern habits of thought. This modern interest in matter-of-fact knowledge and the consequent achievements in material science, comes to an effectual head wherever and so soon, as the handicraft industry has made a considerable advance, in volume and in technological mastery, sufficient to support a fair volume of trade and make thoughtful men passably familiar with the statistical conceptions of the price system.