It is only gradually, concomitant with the gradual maturing of the machine technology, that the systematisation of knowledge in scientific theory has come by common consent to converge on formulations of a genetic process of cumulative change. This science of the machine age is “evolutionary” in a peculiarly impersonal, indeed in a mechanistic sense of the term. In the consummate form, as it stands at the transition to the twentieth century, this evolutionary conception of genetic process is, at least ideally, void of all teleological elements and of all personality—except as personality may be concessively admitted as a by-product of the mechanistic sweep of the blind motions of brute matter. Neither the name nor the notion of a genetic evolution is peculiar to the machine age; but this current, impersonal, unteleological, mechanistic conception of an evolutionary process is peculiar to the late modern fashion of apprehending things.
It goes without saying that this mechanistic conception of process has worked clear of personation and teleological bias only gradually, by insensible decay and progressive elimination of those preconceptions of personal force and teleological fitness that ruled all theoretical knowledge in the days when the principle of sufficient reason held over that of efficient cause; and it should likewise be a matter of course that this shift to the mechanistic footing is by no means yet complete, that scientific inquiry is not yet clear of all contamination with animistic, anthropomorphic, or teleological elements; since the change is of the nature of habit, which takes time, and since the discipline of modern life to which the mechanistic habit of mind is traceable is by no means wholly consistent or unqualified in its mechanistic drift. Yet so far has the habituation to mechanistic ways of thinking taken effect, and so comprehensive and thorough has the discipline of the machine process been, that a mechanistic, unteleological notion of evolution is today a commonplace preconception both with scientists and laymen; whereas a hundred years ago such a conceit had intimately touched the imagination of but very few, if any, among the scientific adepts of the new era.
To what effect Lucretius and his like in classical antiquity, e. g., may have speculated and tried to speak in these premises is by no means easy to make out; nor does it concern the present inquiry, since no vital connection or continuity of habit is traceable between their achievements in this respect and the theoretical preconceptions of modern science or of the machine technology. In the course of modern times conceptions of an evolutionary sequence of creation or of genesis come up with increasing frequency, and from an early period in the machine age these conceptions take on more and more of a mechanistic character, but it is not until Darwin that such a genetic process of evolution is conceived in terms of blind mechanical forces alone, without the help of imputed teleological bias or personalised initiative. It may perhaps be an open question whether the Darwinian conception of evolution is in no degree contaminated with teleological fancies, but however that may be it remains true that a purely mechanistic conception of a genetic process in nature had found no lodgment in scientific theory up to the middle of the nineteenth century. With varying success this conception has since been assimilated by the adepts of all the material sciences, and it may even be said to stand as a tacitly postulated commonplace underlying all modern scientific theory, whether in the material or the social sciences. It is accepted by common consent as a matter of course, although doubtless much antique detail at variance with it stands over both in the theoretical formulations of the adepts and in popular thought, and must continue to stand over until the course of habituation may conceivably in time enforce the sole competency of this mechanistic conception as the definitive norm of systematic knowledge. Whether such an eventuality is to overtake the scope and method of knowledge in Western civilisation should apparently be a question of how protracted, consistent, unmitigated, and how far congruous with their native bent the discipline of the machine process may prove in the further history of these peoples.
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As has been shown above, in its beginnings the machine technology took over the working concepts of handicraft, and it has gradually shifted from the ground of manual operation so afforded to the ground of impersonal mechanical process; but this shifting of base in respect of the elementary technological preconceptions has not hitherto been complete, much of the personal attitude of craftsmanship toward mechanical forces and structures being still visible in the work of modern technologists. In like manner, and concomitant with the transition to the machine industry, there has gone forward a like shifting in respect of the point of view and the elementary preconceptions of science. This has taken effect most largely and gone farthest in the material sciences, as should be expected from the close connection that subsists between these sciences and the technology of the machine industry; but here again the elimination of craftsmanlike conceptions has hitherto not been complete. And, what is more instructive as to the part played by technological discipline in the growth of science, the character of this change in scientific scope, method and preconceptions is somewhat obviously such as would be given by habituation to the working of the machine process. Where later scientific inquiry has departed from or overpassed the limitations imposed by the habits of thought peculiar to craftsmanship the movement has taken the direction enforced by the machine technology.
So, e. g., while the elements made use of by the machine technology, and characteristic of its work, are conceptions of mass, velocity, pressure, stress, vibration, displacement, and the like, these elements are made use of only under the rule that action in any of these bearings takes effect only by impact, by contact directly or through a continuum. The mathematical computations and elucidations that are one main instrumentality employed by the technologist do not and can not include this underlying postulate of contact, since it is an assumption extraneous to those magnitudes of quantity in terms of which this technology does its work. How far this preconception that action can take place only by contact is to be rated as an elementary concept carried over from handicraft, where it is obviously at home and fundamental in all work of manipulation, may perhaps be an idle question. In any case the machine technology is at one with craftsmanship on this head, even though there are many features in modern industrial processes that do not involve action by contact in any such obvious fashion as to suggest its necessary assumption, as, e. g., in processes involving the use of light, heat or electricity. Yet it remains true that, by and large, the technology of the machine process is a technology of action by contact; and, apparently under stress of this wide though not necessarily universal application of the principle, the trained technologist does not rest content until he has in some tenable fashion construed any apparent exception as a special instance under the rule.
So also in modern scientific inquiry. The conceptual elements with which the scientist is content to work are precisely those that have commended themselves as competent in their technological use. Since action by contact is, on the whole, the working principle in the machine process, it is also accepted as the prime postulate in the formulation of all exact knowledge of impersonal facts. There is, of course, no inclination here to criticise or take exception to this characteristic habit of thought that pervades modern scientific inquiry. It has done good service, and to this generation, trained in the enexorably efficient ways of the machine process, the fact that it works is conclusive of its truth.[148] Yet the further fact is not to be overlooked that adherence to this principle is not due to unsophisticated observation simply. It is a principle, a habit of thought, not a fact of simple observation. Doubtless it is a fact of observation, direct and unambiguous, in respect of our own manual operations; and doubtless also it is a matter of such ready inference in respect of many external phenomena as to do duty as a fact of observation in good faith; but doubtless also there are many of these external phenomena that have to be somewhat painstakingly construed to bring them under the rule. Conceivably, even if such a habit of thought had not been handed down from the experience of handicraft it might have been induced by the discipline of the machine process, and might even have been ingrained in men exposed to this discipline in sufficiently rigorous fashion to serve as a prime postulate of scientific inquiry; the machine process doubtless bears out such a principle in the main, and very rigorously. But in point of historical fact it is quite unnecessary to suppose this principle of action by contact to be a product de novo of the discipline of the machine, since it is older than the advent of the machine industry and is also quite consonant with the habits of work enforced by the technology of handicraft, more so indeed than with the technology of the machine industry. It appears fairly indubitable that this principle is a legacy taken over from the experience of life in the days of craftsmanship. And it may even be an open question whether the machine technology would not today be of an appreciably different complexion if it had, as it conceivably might have, developed without the hard and fast limitations imposed by this postulate. Doubtless, scientific inquiry, and the theoretical formulations reached by such inquiry, would differ somewhat notably from what they currently are if the scientists had gone to their work without such a postulate, or holding it in a qualified sense, as a principle of limited scope, as applying only within a limited range of phenomena, only so far as empirical evidence might enforce it in detail.
If, as seems at least presumably true, this principle of action by contact owes its origin to habits induced by manipulation, it will be seen to be of an anthropomorphic derivation. And if it further owes its acceptance as a principle universally applicable to material phenomena to the protracted discipline of life under the technology of handicraft, its universality must also take rank as an anthropomorphic imputation enforced by long habit. It is of the nature of habit, and moreover of workmanlike habit. Casting back into the past history of civilisation and into the contemporary lower cultures, it will appear that the principle (habit of thought) in question is prevalent everywhere and presumably through all human time; as it should be if it is traceable to so ubiquitous an experience as manipulation. But it will also appear that, except within the bounds, in time and space, of the high tide of craftsmanship and the machine technology, this principle does not arrogate to itself universal mandatory authority in the domain of external phenomena. Not only are the tenets of magic and theology at variance with the proposition that action can take place only by mechanical contact; but in the naïve thinking of commonplace humanity outside this machine-made Western civilisation, action at a distance is patently neither imbecile nor incomprehensible as a familiar trait of external objects in their everyday behaviour.
Nor is it by any means a grateful work of spontaneous predilection, all this mechanistic mutilation of objective reality into mere inert dimensions and resistance to pressure; as witness the widely prevalent revulsion, chronic or intermittent, against its acceptance as a final term of knowledge. Laymen seek respite in the fog of occult and esoteric faiths and cults, and so fall back on the will to believe things of which the senses transmit no evidence; while the learned and studious are, by stress of the same “aching void,” drawn into speculative tenets of ostensible knowledge that purport to go nearer to the heart of reality, and that elude all mechanistic proof or disproof. This revulsion against thinking in uncoloured mechanistic terms alone runs suggestively parallel with that other revulsion, already spoken of, against the geometrically adjusted routine of conduct imposed on modern life by the machine process; the two are in great part coincident, or concomitant, both in point of the class of persons affected by each and in point of the uncertain measure of finality attending the move so made in either case. Neither the manner of life imposed by the machine process, nor the manner of thought inculcated by habituation to its logic, will fall in with the free movement of the human spirit, born, as it is, to fit the conditions of savage life. So there comes an irrepressible—in a sense, congenital—recrudescence of magic, occult science, telepathy, spiritualism, vitalism, pragmatism.[149]
It was noted above that action by contact is not included, except by subsumption, in the mathematical formulations of technology or science. It should now be added that in all the concomitance and sequence with which the mathematical formulations of mechanical phenomena are occupied, the assumption of concomitance or sequence at a distance will fill the requirements of the formulæ quite as convincingly and commonly more simply than the assumption of concomitance by contact only. To realise the difficulties which beset this postulate of action by mechanical continuity solely, as well as the prima facie imbecility of the principle itself, it is only necessary to call to mind the tortuous theories of gravitation designed to keep it intact, and the prodigy of incongruous intangibilities known as the ether,—a rigid and imponderable fluid.