This difference between these ages is due to the fact that during the earlier age things were made with hand tools, and during the later one with machine tools.
Machinery in a theoretical or traditional age would be an anachronism. It must have an experimental or scientific age for its development, and, paradoxical as it may seem, this the machinery must make for itself. Every period in human history has had its determining character from the tools which brought it into being.
Supernaturalism has no place in the observations, investigations or experimentations which are necessary to the invention, construction and operation of a great machine and, hence, the machines have banished the gods from the roof of the earth and the devils from its cellar, leaving it to us to make of it what we please, a heaven or a hell without reference to them. In his brilliant work entitled "Social and Philosophical Studies", translated by Charles H. Kerr, Paul Lafargue writes:
The labour of the mechanical factory puts the wage-worker in touch with terrible natural forces unknown to the peasant, but instead of being mastered by them he controls them. The gigantic mechanism of iron and steel which fills the factory, which makes him move like an automaton, which sometimes clutches him, bruises him, mutilates him, does not engender in him a superstitious terror as the thunder does in the peasant, but leaves him unmoved, for he knows that the limbs of the mechanical monster were fashioned and mounted by his comrades, and that he has but to push a lever to set it in motion or stop it. The machine, in spite of its miraculous power and productiveness, has no mystery for him. The labourer in the electrical works, who has but to turn a crank on a dial to send miles of motive power to tramways, or light the lamps of a city, has but to say, like the God of Genesis, "let there be light," and there is light. Never sorcery more fantastic was imagined, yet for him this sorcery is a simple and natural thing. He would be greatly surprised if one were to come and tell him that a certain god might, if he chose, stop the machines and extinguish the lights when the electricity had been turned on; he would reply that this anarchistic god would be simply a misplaced gearing or a broken wire, and that it would be easy for him to seek and find this disturbing god. The practice of the modern factory teaches scientific determinism to the wage-worker, without it being necessary for him to pass through the theoretic study of the sciences.
Earth must be a hell as long as we allow the capitalist system to continue on it and to enslave the vast majority of its inhabitants. Marxian socialism will ring out the old era with its hell of human slavery and ring in the new era with its heaven of machine slavery.
One point must be grasped and held by all who would understand the changes which take place within the social realm and it is this: they are due to the differences in the instrumentalities or machines by which the necessities of life are produced.
Man has risen above the lower animals which have common ancestors with his own, because of the superiority of the hand by which he does things to the hands by which they do things. If a man's body in general and hand in particular were not a great improvement over the bodies and hands of the apes, his mind and morality would differ but little from theirs.
The superiority of the civilization of this age over its predecessors is a question of instrumentalities by which the efficiency of the hand is increased.
If all the modern machinery were taken from this generation and replaced by the implements of the stone age the civilization of the next generation would begin to sink, and within a century it would reach the ancient level.
Strong expression is also given to the great truth upon which we are here dwelling by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in its noteworthy Manifesto: