Associated with the principle of action by mechanical continuity alone is a second metaphysical postulate of science,—the conservation of energy, or persistence of quantity. Like its fellow it does not admit of empirical proof; yet it is likewise held to be of universal application. This principle, that the quantity of matter or of energy does not increase or diminish, or, perhaps better, that the quantity of mechanical fact at large is invariable, has a better presumptive claim to rank as a by-product of the machine technology; although such a claim could doubtless be allowed only with broad qualifications. Not that the principle was not known or not formally accepted prior to the machine age; long ago the Roman scholar and the scholastic philosophers after him declared ex nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti. But throughout the era of handicraft there continued also to be devoutly held the postulate that the material universe had a beginning in an act of creation, as also that it would some day come to an end, a quantitative collapse. As the era of handicraft advanced and, apparently, as the discipline of life under that technology enforced the habitual acceptance of the proposition that the quantity of material fact is constant, much ingenuity and much ambiguous speech was spent in an endeavour to reconcile the mechanical efficiency of the creative fiat with the dictum, ex nihilo nihil fit. But down to the close of that era it remains true that, by and large, the peoples of Christendom continued to believe in the mechanically creative efficiency of the Great Artificer; although, it must be admitted, with an ever growing apprehension that in this tenet of the faith they were face to face with a divine mystery. The eighteenth-century scientists, and many even in the nineteenth century, continued to profess belief in a creative origin of material things, as well as also in a providential guidance of material events,—which latter must have been conceived to be exerted by some other means than action through mechanical contact, since one term of the relation was conceived not to be of a mechanical nature.
It is not until the machine age is well under way and the machine technology has come to occupy the land, that faith in the theorem of the conservation of energy has grown robust enough to let the scientists lose interest in all questions of creation. The tenet has died by neglect, not by confutation. That it has done so among the adepts of the material sciences, and that it is doing so among the lay population at large in the modern industrial communities, is probably to be credited to the discipline of the machine process and the technological conceptions to which that discipline conduces. It conduces to this outcome in more than one way. This modern technology is a technology of mechanical process; it looks to and takes care of a sequence of mechanical action, rather than to the conditions of its inception or the sequel of its conclusion. A mind imbued with the logic of this machine process does not by habitual proclivity or with incisive effect attend to these alien matters that have no meaning within the horizon of that logic. The creative augmentation of material objects is a matter lying without the scope of the machine’s logic.
As has already been remarked, the principle (habit of thought) that the quantity of material fact is constant is necessarily of ancient derivation and long growth. Taken in a presumptive sense, and held loosely as a commonplace of experience, it must have come up and attained some force very early in the workmanlike experience of the race. And the closer the application to the work in hand, the more consistently would this principle of common sense approve itself; so that it should, as indeed is sufficiently evident, be well at home among the habitual generalisations current in the days of handicraft; although it does not seem to have been generally accepted at that time as a principle necessarily having a universal application,—as witness the ready credence then given to theological dogmas of creation and the like. The habits of accountancy that came on under the price system, as the scope of the market grew larger with the growth and diversification of handicraft, seem to have had a great effect in extending and confirming the habitual acceptance of such a theorem. A strict balance, a running equilibrium of the quantitative items involved, is the central fact of the accountant’s occupation. And this habit of scrutiny and balancing of quantities, and a meticulous tracing out and accounting for any apparent excess or deficiency in the sums handled, pervades the community at large, though in a less pronounced fashion, as well as that fraction of the population employed in trade. The discipline of the handicraft system in this respect gains incontinently in scope and vigour as the growth of that technological system, with its characteristic business management, goes forward.
When presently the machine technology comes forward this habitual preconception touching the invariability of material quantity finds new applications and new refinements of application, with the outcome that its guidance of men’s thinking grows ever more inclusive and more peremptory. But it is not until half a century after the Industrial Revolution that the principle may be said finally to have gained unquestioning acceptance as a theorem universally binding on material phenomena. By that time—about the second quarter of the nineteenth century—the unqualified validity of this theorem had become so unmitigated a matter of course as to have fairly shifted from the ground of empirical generalisation to that of metaphysical thesis. Men of science then quite ingenuously set about proving the law of the Conservation of Energy by appeal to experiments and reasoning that proceeded with absolute naïveté on the tacit assumption of the theorem to be proven.
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In its bearing on the growth of institutions the machine technology has yet scarcely had time to make its mark. Such institutional factors as, e. g., the common law are necessarily of slow growth. A system of civil rights is not only a balanced scheme of habitual responses to those stimuli at whose impact they take effect; it is at the same time a scheme which has the sanction of avowed common consent, such as will express itself in rating these institutional elements as facts of immemorial usage or as integrally inherent in the nature of things from the beginning. Such civil institutions take shape as prescriptive custom, and matters of habit which so are supported by broad grounds of authenticity and correlation with other elements of a prescriptive scheme of things will adapt themselves only tardily to any change in the situation or to any new bias in the drift of discipline. What happened in the matter of civil rights under the system of handicraft is an illustration in point. There need be little question but the eighteenth century scheme of Natural Rights was an outcome of the protracted discipline characteristic of the era of handicraft, and an adaptation to the exigencies of daily life under that system.
The scheme of Natural Rights, with its principles of Natural Liberty and its insistence on individual self-help, was well adapted to the requirements of handicraft and the petty trade, whose spirit it reflects with admirable faithfulness. But it was of slow growth, as any scheme of institutions must be, in the nature of things. So much so that handicraft and the petty trade had been in effectual operation some half-a-dozen centuries, in ever increasing force, before the corresponding system of civil rights and moral obligations made good its pretensions to rule the economic affairs of the community. Indeed, it is only by the latter half of the eighteenth century that the system of Natural Rights came to passable maturity and finally took rank as a secure principle of enlightened common sense; and by that time the handicraft system was giving way to the machine industry. And even then this result was reached only in the most advanced industrial community of Europe, where the discipline of handicraft and trade had had the freest scope to work out its natural bent, with the least hindrance from other dominant interests at variance with its schooling.[150]
So it has come about that while the system of Natural Rights is an institutional by-product of workmanship under the handicraft system and is adapted to the exigencies of craftsmanship and the petty trade, it never fully took effect in the shaping of institutions until that phase of economic life was substantially past, or until the new era, of the machine industry and the large business brought on by the new technology, had come to rule the economic situation. So that hitherto the work of the machine industry has been organised and conducted under a code of legal rights and business principles adapted to the state of the industrial arts which the machine industry has displaced. Latterly, it is true, the requirements of the machine technology, in the way of large-scale organisation, continuity of operation, and interstitial balance of the industrial system, have begun to show themselves so patently at variance with these business principles engendered by the era of handicraft as to throw a shadow of doubt on the adequacy of these “Natural” metaphysics of natural liberty, self-help, free competition, individual initiative, and the like. But, harsh as has been the discrepancy between the received system of economic institutions on the one side and the working of the machine technology on the other, its effect in reshaping current habits of thought in these premises has hitherto come to nothing more definitive than an uneasy conviction that “Something will have to be done about it.” Indeed, so far is the machine process from having yet recast the principles of industrial management, as distinct from technological procedure, that the efforts inspired in responsible public officials and public-spirited citizens by this patent discrepancy have hitherto been directed wholly to regulating industry into consonance with the antiquated scheme of business principles, rather than to take thought of how best to conduct industrial affairs and the distribution of livelihood in consonance with the technological requirements of the machine industry.
It is true, among the workmen, and particularly among those skilled workmen who have been trained in the machine technology and are exposed to the full impact of the machine’s discipline, uncritical habitual faith in this institutional scheme is beginning to crumble, so far as regards that principle of Natural Rights that vests unlimited discretion in the owner of property, and so far as regards property in the material equipment of industry. But this is about as broad a proposition of such a kind as current facts of opinion and agitation will bear out, and this inchoate break with the received habitual views touching the dues and obligations of discretion in industrial matters is extremely vague and almost wholly negative. Even in those members of the community who are most directly and rigorously exposed to its discipline the machine process has hitherto wrought no such definite bias, no such positive habitual attitude of workmanlike initiative towards the conventions of industrial management as to result in a constructive deviation from the received principles.[151]
On the other hand the business principles engendered by the habit of mind that gave rise to the system of Natural Rights has had grave consequences for workmanship under the conditions imposed by the machine industry. As has been shown in some detail in the foregoing chapter, the individualistic organisation of the work, coupled with the personal incidence of the handicraft technology, and the stress thrown on price rating and self-help by the ever increasing recourse to bargain and sale (“free contract”) under that system, led in the end to the habitual rating of workmanship in terms of the price it would bring. Then as always workmanlike efficiency commanded the approval of thoughtful men, as being serviceable to the common good and as a substantial manifestation of human excellence; and at the same time, then as ever, efficient work was a source of comfort and complacency to the workman. But under the teaching of the price system efficiency came to be rated in terms of the pecuniary gain.