One other remark is suggested by the reference to process as contradistinguished from product. Here, again, the real question is, How far is such a distinction maintainable in fact? Does it rest upon any definite separation in Nature? The exact contradictory is the truth; taking the world as it is, the distinction, though clear in thought, becomes essentially fluent when objectively regarded. What we call a production one moment, we say is a process the next. You have, for example, a galvanic current, produced by certain chemical combinations, and often a product per se of some importance. Yet the current itself is a part of the electrotyping process. Suppose this done, you have your electrotype—your coin,—a hard fact,—a solid production, bright, beautiful, admirable! But we will suppose you, while devising all this, to have a further view;—the coin is to be employed in the process of imposture. Here again comes a result—a great fraud committed; but this is not all. The fraudulent procedure turns out a very useful police-trap, and your chemical combination sends the last actor on the scene to Portland, for at least ten years. Consider in this brief history the scientific arrangements, material conditions, and workmanlike execution, discernible in its earlier parts; then, see how mind becomes gradually predominant, and how Law, based on ideas of corrective justice, enters the series. Add the judge and jury, and you admit the force of intellect,—deliberating, deciding, putting further activities in motion; till, perhaps, if the reformatory process succeeds, Portland may have the honour of giving to society the welcome product of (as times go) a passably honest man. We might really frame a curious inquiry as respects this flowing tide of process and production, production and process, with its commingling currents and waves which seem to interrupt each other like circles of diffracted light. We might ask which of all these parts of the moving diorama is most distinctly human. I believe most people would say, those scenes in which mind, not mere workmanship, is most evidently discernible.
Professor Powell seems to have thought so too. The difficulty we have been discussing he states as an objection requiring solution.[20]
"In those cases most nearly approaching the nature of human works, such as the varied and endless changes in matter going on in the laboratory of nature, the results, even when most analogous to those obtained in human laboratories, yet present no marks of the process or of the means employed, by which to recognise the analogous workman; and in all the grander productions, the incessant evolutions of vegetable and animal life, which no human laboratory can produce,—in the structure of earth and ocean, or the infinite expanse of the heavens and their transcendent mechanism, still further must we be from finding any analogy to the works of man, or, by consequence, any analogy to a personal individual artificer."
The next paragraph contains his own judgment.
"But the more just view of the case is that which arises from the consideration that the real evidence is that of mind and intelligence; for here we have a proper and strict analogy. Mind directing the operations of the laboratory or the workshop, is no part of the visible apparatus, nor are its operations seen in themselves—they are visible only in their effects;—and from effects, however dissimilar in magnitude or in kind, yet agreeing in the one grand condition of order, adjustment, profound and recondite connexion and dependence, there is the same evidence and outward manifestation of Invisible Intelligence, as vast and illimitable as the universe throughout which those manifestations are seen."
This second extract may be analysed into distinct propositions somewhat as follows:—
In a manufactory,—
Mind is no part of the visible apparatus—nor are its operations visible,—
But the effects make the operations manifest.—