The means whereby this work of Nature is brought to its consummate issue are forces of Nature working under her Laws by the method of cause and effect. The principle, or “law,” of causation is a metaphysical postulate; in the sense that such a fact as causation is unproved and unprovable. No man has ever observed a case of causation, as is a commonplace with the latterday psychologists. But such a doubt does not present itself seriously in the days of handicraft; it would be out of touch with the spirit of the time and the discipline of that craftsmanship out of which the spirit of the time arises. To the inquiring minds of that era it is a matter of course and of common sense that the forces of Nature are seen to work out the effects which emerge before their eyes. What they see in fact may be, as the modern psychologists would perhaps say, a certain concomitance and sequence in the observed phenomena; but what those observers see in effect is always a certain cause working out a certain effect. The imputation of causal efficiency to the observed phenomena is so thoroughly a matter of course that there is no sense of imputation in the observer’s mind.
Observation simply, without imputation of anthropomorphic qualities and efficacies, should yield nothing more to the purpose than idle concomitance and sequence of phenomena, but there is, in effect, none of this early scientific work done in terms of simple concomitance or sequence alone; nor for that matter, has any of the effective (theoretical) work of modern science been carried to an issue by the use of such objective terms of concomitance and sequence alone, whether in that or in a later age, without the help of a putative causal nexus. Through the early modern scientific period there runs an increasingly free and frequent recourse to statistical argument,—in the material sciences a recourse to punctilious measurement, enumeration and instruments of precision; but it is of the essence of the case that the phenomenal facts which so are subjected to measurement and statistical computation are facts selected for the purpose on the strength of their (putatively) known causal implication in the problem whose solution is sought, and that the facts which emerge from these measurements, computations, and instruments of precision, are turned to account in an argument of cause and effect; they have served their purpose only when and in so far as they enable the inquirer to determine the course of efficient transition from a putative cause to a putative effect, or conversely.
The relation of cause and effect, as commonly conceived by the vulgar and as commonly employed by the scientist, is a putative relation between phenomena which can not be said to stand in any observed relation of efficiency to one another. Efficiency, as understood in this connection, is not a fact of observation, but of imputation; and efficiency, performance of work, is the substance of the causal relation as that concept is universally employed in modern science. It may well be said that this recourse to the concept of efficient cause—a metaphysical postulate touching a putative fact—is the distinguishing characteristic of modern science as contrasted with any other scheme of systematised knowledge.[130]
Not only does the development of modern science rest on this postulate of causality, but the concept of causation which so characterises the modern sciences is of a particular and restricted kind. At least on the face of things it seems unquestionable that the peculiar temper and limitations of this modern European concept of causation are to be credited to the habits wrought out by a life under the handicraft system. It has been noted already that the ubiquitous prevalence of trade and of the price system in modern times has given to the modern apprehension of facts a certain objectivity, a degree of impersonality, which is at least a characteristic of modern knowledge, whether scientific or commonplace, even if it cannot be said to be a unique distinction of modern science as contrasted with other deliberate systems of knowledge. But it is the unique distinction of modern science, particularly as it comes into view in its early phases, that its concept of causality is drawn not simply in terms of workmanship but specifically in terms of craftsmanship. There need probably be no argument spent on the thesis that the sense of causality is, by and large, a particular manifestation of the sense of workmanship. But the sense of workmanship in its native scope apparently covers something more than the manual efficiency of the skilled workman simply. And in other times and under other cultural (technological) circumstances the sense of workmanship has apparently given rise to concepts of causation of a wider, or at least of a looser, scope. In the naïve rating of savage peoples workmanship appears to cover, perhaps uncertainly, notions of generation, nurture, tendance, and the like, without any sharp line being drawn between these various lines of effective endeavour on the one side and manual efficiency on the other. And so, on the other hand, in the cosmological knowledge (or quasi-knowledge) current among these peoples explanation in terms of generation and growth are accepted as final along with explanations in terms of what the modern man would conceive to be the stricter sense of cause and effect. Even in the speculations of the sages of classical antiquity, and again in the cosmologies and natural history of the far-Oriental peoples, many questions of cause and effect are found to be sufficiently disposed of when worked out in the like terms of generation, growth and quasi-physiological mutation.
To modern inquiry explanations in these terms, other than those of physically effective work, are provisional at the best, and are held to only as awaiting a final solution in a materially, mechanistically competent way. And what is alone materially competent in the modern scientific apprehension is such an explanation as will make things plain in terms of matter and motion, working a change in the constitution of things by displacement through contact and pressure. Causation is conceived as manual work,—to use a French term, it is a remaniement of raw materials at hand. Physiological or chemical explanations must finally be recast in terms of physics, to satisfy the modern scientist’s sense of finality, and physics must be made to run in terms of impact, pressure, displacement in space, regrouping of material particles, coördinated movements and a shifting of equilibrium.
Through all this runs the concomitant requirement of quantivalence, statable in statistical form. The scientist’s results are not finally merchantable, on the scientific exchange, until they have been reduced to such terms of accountancy as would be comprehensible to the man trained in the merchandising traffic of the petty trade, for whose conviction things must be punctiliously rated in exchange value. But, as has been noted above, it is only as an expedient of scientific accountancy that the facts under inquiry are kept account of in an itemised bill of values. This meticulous statistical accountancy is necessary to safeguard the accuracy of the work done and its conformity with the facts in hand; but the work so done handles these facts as active factors which go efficiently to the production of the results observed. The cause is conceived to produce the effect, somewhat after the fashion in which a skilled workman produces a finished article of trade. But when the scientist has set forth the operations and working conditions that have brought forth the effects which he is engaged in explaining, he must also, in order to the conviction of his fellow craftsmen, show a statistically itemised statement of receipts and expenditures covering the facts engaged,—in quantitative values he must show that the costs are balanced by the values that emerge in the finished product of that workmanlike process of causation whose recondite nature and course he has so laid bare to the light of understanding.
This attempted characterisation of modern scientific inquiry and its working concepts applies immediately to the earlier phases and down to a date well past the advent of the machine industry,—so far past that date as to allow time and experience to work the new habits of thought peculiar to the machine technology into the texture of men’s preconceptions. In time, but tardily, as is the case with the pervasive effects of any new line of habituation, the discipline of the machine has wrought a further, though, hitherto less profound and decisive, change in the aims and methods of science; a discussion of which is deferred until it comes up again in its connection with the new technology. Less cogently and with qualifications, however, the above characterisation will apply to the later phases of modern science, as well as to that initial stage that marks the era of handicraft.
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Something further is due to be said of the cultural consequences of this discipline in workmanship during the era of handicraft, besides its guidance in the growth of technology and the related field of material science. As has been intimated above, habituation to the working conceptions of handicraft had much to do with that revision of the religious cult and its theological tenets that has shaped the spiritual life of modern times in contrast with the medieval life of faith. But it is an ungrateful, perhaps ungraceful, office to turn the dry light of matter-of-fact on the sacred verities, and a degree of parsimony will best be observed in any layman’s discussion of these intimate movements of the spirit. Yet it seems necessary to call to mind at least one point of singular concomitance between the state of the industrial arts and fortunes of the Christian faith.
Characteristic of modern times has been the Protestant rehabilitation of the cult and its tenets. In this rehabilitation, which has not been without effect even within the Catholic church, much of the ancient spirit of subjection has been lost, replaced in part with a certain attitude of self-help and autonomy on the part of the laity. There is a degree of democratic initiative and a gild-like spirit of lay discretion in spiritual affairs. As already noted above, the tenets of the faith have also in some degree been revised and reconstructed in terms consonant with the workmanlike conceptions of the handicraft system. Such a protestant or quasi-protestant reconstruction of the cult and its tenets set in, as is well known, successively in the several leading countries of Europe, somewhat in the same order as these several countries successively advanced to a high level of technological and commercial enterprise. As noted above, in the south in the so-called Latin countries, this era of industrial and commercial enterprise was presently checked; the like being true in a less pronounced fashion for the peoples of Central Europe. Wherever the advance was seriously checked, so that the era of handicraft closed in collapse or reaction on its secular side, there the reconstruction of the religious cult also came to an incomplete issue at the most. So that by the definitive close of the era of handicraft those peoples of Christendom that had maintained the advance achieved in this secular respect were also the ones that had accepted and continued to hold the revised form of the faith. Where this era of industrial and business enterprise closed in exhaustion and collapse, there the ancient form of the faith also triumphed over the heretics. It is, indeed, to be remarked as a sufficiently striking coincidence that even now the centre of diffusion of the modern industry is at the same time the centre of diffusion of religious protestantism and heresy. And the antique forms and fervour of the faith are found in better preservation progressively outward from this centre of diffusion; and even in somewhat minute detail it appears to hold true not only that the more advanced industrial peoples are the less amenable to religious control and less given to superstitious observances of the archaic sort, but also that within these industrial countries the industrial centres in the narrower sense of the word are less devout, or devout in a less archaic fashion, than the non-industrial population at large. Something of the kind, indeed, has been visibly true ever since a relatively early phase of the handicraft system; though nothing like undevoutness can be alleged of the industrial town population during the handicraft era proper. The handicraft population was devout, but not consistently orthodox; and the industrial towns of that time were devout enough in their way, but it was in a way obnoxious to the received dogmas of the church. They were centres of devout heresy. It is only in late modern times that the malady has progressed so far that it may fairly be called a degree of apostacy. This concomitance between technological mastery and religious dissent is doubtless susceptible of a good and serviceable explanation at the hands of the religious experts; it is here cited without prejudice as having at least a negative bearing on the question of how the discipline of the handicraft industry may be conceived to affect men’s spiritual attitude in a field so remote as that of the life of faith.[131]