On the lower levels of culture, even more decidedly than on the higher, the speculative systematisation of knowledge is prone to take the form of theology (mythology) and cosmology. This theological and cosmological lore serves the savage and barbaric peoples as a theoretical account of the scheme of things, and its characteristic traits vary in response to the variations of the institutional scheme under which the community lives. In a prevailingly peaceable agricultural community, such, e.g., as the more peaceable Pueblo Indians or the more settled Indians of the Middle West, there is little coercive authority, few and slight class distinctions involving superiority and inferiority; property rights are few, slight and unstable; relationship is likely to be counted in the female line. In such a culture the cosmological lore is likely to offer explanations of the scheme of things in terms of generation or germination and growth. Creation by fiat is not obtrusively or characteristically present. The laws of nature bear the character of an habitual behavior of things, rather than that of an authoritative code of ordinances imposed by an overruling providence. The theology is likely to be polytheistic in an extreme degree and in an extremely loose sense of the term, embodying relatively little of the suzerainty of God. The relation of the deities to mankind is likely to be that of consanguinity, and as if to emphasise the peaceable, non-coercive character of the divine order of things, the deities are, in the main, very apt to be females. The matters of interest dealt with in the cosmological theories are chiefly matters of the livelihood of the people, the growth and care of the crops, and the promotion of industrial ways and means.
With these phenomena of the peaceable culture may be contrasted the order of things found among a predatory pastoral people—and pastoral peoples tend strongly to take on a predatory cultural scheme. Such a people will adopt male deities, in the main, and will impute to them a coercive, imperious, arbitrary animus and a degree of princely dignity. They will also tend strongly to a monotheistic, patriarchal scheme of divine government; to explain things in terms of creative fiat; and to a belief in the control of the natural universe by rules imposed by divine ordinance. The matters of prime consequence in this theology are matters of the servile relation of man to God, rather than the details of the quest of a livelihood. The emphasis falls on the glory of God rather than on the good of man. The Hebrew scriptures, particularly the Jahvistic elements, show such a scheme of pastoral cultural and predatory theoretical generalisations.
The learning cultivated on the lower levels of culture might be gone into at some length if space and time permitted, but even what has been said may serve to show, in the most general way, what are the characteristic marks of this savage and barbarian lore. A similarly summary characterisation of a cultural situation nearer home will bear more directly on the immediate topic of inquiry. The learning of mediæval Christendom shows such a concomitance between the scheme of knowledge and the scheme of institutions, somewhat analogous to the barbaric Hebrew situation. The mediæval scheme of institutions was of a coercive, authoritative character, essentially a scheme of graded mastery and graded servitude, in which a code of honor and a bill of differential dignity held the most important place. The theology of that time was of a like character. It was a monotheistic, or rather a monarchical system, and of a despotic complexion. The cosmological scheme was drawn in terms of fiat; and the natural philosophy was occupied, in the main and in its most solemn endeavors, with the corollaries to be subsumed under the divine fiat. When the philosophical speculation dealt with facts it aimed to interpret them into systematic consistency with the glory of God and the divine purpose. The "realities" of the scholastic lore were spiritual, quasi-personal, intangible, and fell into a scale of differential dignity and prepotency. Matter-of-fact knowledge and work-day information were not then fit topics of dignified inquiry. The interval, or discrepancy, between reality and actuality was fairly wide. Throughout that era, of course, work-day knowledge also continually increased in volume and consistency; technological proficiency was gaining; the effective control of natural processes was growing larger and more secure; showing that matter-of-fact theories drawn from experience were being extended and were made increasing use of. But all this went on in the field of industry; the matter-of-fact theories were accepted as substantial and ultimate only for the purposes of industry, only as technological maxims, and were beneath the dignity of science.
With the transition to modern times industry comes into the foreground in the west-European scheme of life, and the institutions of European civilisation fall into a more intimate relation with the exigencies of industry and technology. The technological range of habituation progressively counts for more in the cultural complex, and the discrepancy between the technological discipline and the discipline of law and order under the institutions then in force grows progressively less. The institutions of law and order take on a more impersonal, less coercive character. Differential dignity and invidious discriminations between classes gradually lose force.
The industry which so comes into the foreground and so affects the scheme of institutions is peculiar in that its most obvious and characteristic trait is the workmanlike initiative and efficiency of the individual handicraftsman and the individual enterprise of the petty trader. The technology which embodies the theoretical substance of this industry is a technology of workmanship, in which the salient factors are personal skill, force and diligence. Such a technology, running as it does in great part on personal initiative, capacity, and application, approaches nearer to the commonplace features of the institutional fabric than many another technological system might; and its disciplinary effects in some considerable measure blend with those of the institutional discipline. The two lines of habituation, in the great era of handicraft and petty trade, even came to coalesce and fortify one another; as in the organisation of the craft gilds and of the industrial towns. Industrial life and usage came to intrude creatively into the cultural scheme on the one hand and into the scheme of authentic knowledge on the other hand. So the body of matter-of-fact knowledge, in modern times, is more and more drawn into the compass of theoretical inquiry; and theoretical inquiry takes on more and more of the animus and method of technological generalisation. But the matter-of-fact elements so drawn in are construed in terms of workmanlike initiative and efficiency, as required by the technological preconceptions of the era of handicraft.
In this way, it may be conceived, modern science comes into the field under the cloak of technology and gradually encroaches on the domain of authentic theory previously held by other, higher, nobler, more profound, more spiritual, more intangible conceptions and systems of knowledge. In this early phase of modern science its central norm and universal solvent is the concept of workmanlike initiative and efficiency. This is the new organon. Whatever is to be explained must be reduced to this notation and explained in these terms; otherwise the inquiry does not come to rest. But when the requirements of this notation in terms of workmanship have been duly fulfilled the inquiry does come to rest.
By the early decades of the nineteenth century, with a passable degree of thoroughness, other grounds of validity and other interpretations of phenomena, other vouchers for truth and reality, had been eliminated from the quest of authentic knowledge and from the terms in which theoretical results were conceived or expressed. The new organon had made good its pretensions. In this movement to establish the hegemony of workmanlike efficiency—under the style and title of the "law of causation," or of "efficient cause"—in the realm of knowledge, the English-speaking communities took the lead after the earlier scientific onset of the south-European communities had gone up in the smoke of war, politics and religion during the great era of state-making. The ground of this British lead in science is apparently the same as that of the British lead in technology which came to a head in the Industrial Revolution; and these two associated episodes of European civilisation are apparently both traceable to the relatively peaceable run of life, and so of habituation, in the English-speaking communities, as contrasted with the communities of the continent.[3]
Along with the habits of thought peculiar to the technology of handicraft, modern science also took over and assimilated much of the institutional preconceptions of the era of handicraft and petty trade. The "natural laws," with the formulation of which this early modern science is occupied, are the rules governing natural "uniformities of sequence"; and they punctiliously formulate the due procedure of any given cause creatively working out the achievement of a given effect, very much as the craft rules sagaciously specified the due routine for turning out a staple article of merchantable goods. But these "natural laws" of science are also felt to have something of that integrity and prescriptive moral force that belongs to the principles of the system of "natural rights" which the era of handicraft has contributed to the institutional scheme of later times. The natural laws were not only held to be true to fact, but they were also felt to be right and good. They were looked upon as intrinsically meritorious and beneficent, and were held to carry a sanction of their own. This habit of uncritically imputing merit and equity to the "natural laws" of science continued in force through much of the nineteenth century; very much as the habitual acceptance of the principles of "natural rights" has held on by force of tradition long after the exigencies of experience out of which these "rights" sprang ceased to shape men's habits of life.[4] This traditional attitude of submissive approval toward the "natural laws" of science has not yet been wholly lost, even among the scientists of the passing generation, many of whom have uncritically invested these "laws" with a prescriptive rectitude and excellence; but so far, at least, has this animus progressed toward disuse that it is now chiefly a matter for expatiation in the pulpit, the accredited vent for the exudation of effete matter from the cultural organism.
The traditions of the handicraft technology lasted over as a commonplace habit of thought in science long after that technology had ceased to be the decisive element in the industrial situation; while a new technology, with its inculcation of new habits of thought, new preconceptions, gradually made its way among the remnants of the old, altering them, blending with them, and little by little superseding them. The new technological departure, which made its first great epoch in the so-called industrial revolution, in the technological ascendancy of the machine-process, brought a new and characteristic discipline into the cultural situation. The beginnings of the machine-era lie far back, no doubt; but it is only of late, during the past century at the most, that the machine-process can be said to have come into the dominant place in the technological scheme; and it is only later still that its discipline has, even in great part, remodeled the current preconceptions as to the substantial nature of what goes on in the current of phenomena whose changes excite the scientific curiosity. It is only relatively very lately, whether in technological work or in scientific inquiry, that men have fallen into the habit of thinking in terms of process rather than in terms of the workmanlike efficiency of a given cause working to a given effect.
These machine-made preconceptions of modern science, being habits of thought induced by the machine technology in industry and in daily life, have of course first and most consistently affected the character of those sciences whose subject matter lies nearest to the technological field of the machine-process; and in these material sciences the shifting to the machine-made point of view has been relatively very consistent, giving a highly impersonal interpretation of phenomena in terms of consecutive change, and leaving little of the ancient preconceptions of differential reality or creative causation. In such a science as physics or chemistry, e.g., we are threatened with the disappearance or dissipation of all stable and efficient substances; their place being supplied, or their phenomena being theoretically explained, by appeal to unremitting processes of inconceivably high-pitched consecutive change.