Owing, probably, to the peculiar topography of Europe, small-scale and broken, the pastoral-predatory culture has never been fully developed or naturalised in this region; nor has a monarchy of the great type characteristic of western Asia ever run its course in Europe. The nearest approach to such a despotic state would be the Roman Empire; which was after all essentially Mediterranean, largely Levantine, rather than peculiarly European. And owing probably to the same conditioning limitations of topography the subsequent sequence of institutional phenomena have also been characteristically different in this European region from that in the large and fertile lands of the near East. It is necessarily this run of events in the Western culture that is of chief interest to the present inquiry; which will therefore most conveniently follow the historical outlines of this culture in its later phases, in so far as these outlines are to be drawn in economic terms of a large generality.

In a passably successful fashion the peoples of Christendom made the transition from a frankly predatory and servile establishment, in the Dark Ages, to a settled, quasi-peaceable situation resting on fairly secure property rights, chiefly in land, by the close of the Middle Ages. This transition was accompanied by a growth of handicraft, itinerant merchandising and industrial towns, so massive as to outlive and displace the feudal system under whose tutelage it took its rise, and of so marked a technological character as to have passed into history as the “era of handicraft.” Technologically, this era is marked by an ever advancing growth of craftsmanship; until it passes over into the régime of the machine industry when its technology had finally outgrown those limitations of handicraft and petty trade that gave it its character as a distinct phase of economic history. In its beginning the handicraft system was made up of impecunious craftsmen, working in severalty and working for a livelihood, and the rules of the craft-gilds that presently took shape and exercised control were drawn on that principle.123 The petty trade which characteristically runs along with the development of handicraft was carried on after the same detail fashion and was presently organised on lines afforded by the same principle of work for a livelihood.

Presently, however, in early modern times, larger holdings of property came to be employed in the itinerant trade, and investment for a profit found its way into this trade as also into the handicraft system proper. The processes of industry grew more extensive and roundabout, the specialisation of occupations (“division of labour”) increased, the scale of organisation grew larger, and the practice of employing impecunious workmen in organised bodies under the direction of wealthier masters came to be the prevailing form taken by the industry of the time.

From near the beginnings of the handicraft system, and throughout the period of its flourishing, the output of the industry was habitually sold at a price, in terms of money. In the earlier days the price was regulated on the basis of labour cost, on the principle that a competent craftsman must be allowed a fair livelihood, and much thought and management was spent on the determination and maintenance of such a “just price.” But in the course of generations, with further development of trade and markets, this conception of price by degrees gave way to or passed over into the modern presumption that any article of value is worth what it will bring; until, when the era of handicraft and petty trade merges in the late-modern régime of investment and machine industry, it has become the central principle of pecuniary relations that price is a matter to be arranged freely between buyer and seller on the basis of bargain and sale.

The characteristic traits of this era are the handicraft industry and the petty trade which handled the output of that industry, with the trade gradually coming into a position of discretionary management, and even dominating the industry of the craftsmen to such an extent that by the date when the technology of handicraft begins to give way to the factory organisation and the machine industry the workmen are already somewhat fully under the control of the businessmen. Visibly, the ruling cause of this change in the relations between the craftsmen on the one hand and the traders and master-employers on the other hand was the increasing magnitude of the material means necessary to the pursuit of industry, due to such a growth of technology as required an ever larger, more finished and more costly complement of appliances. So that in the course of the era of handicraft the ancient relation between owners and workmen gradually re-established itself within the framework of the new technology; with the difference that the owners in whose hands the discretion now lay, and to whose gain the net output of industry now inured, were the businessmen, investors, the owners of the industrial plant and of the apparatus of trade, instead of as formerly the owners of the soil.

Under the handicraft system, and to the extent to which that system shaped the situation, the instinct of workmanship again came into a dominant position among the factors that made up the discipline of daily life and so gave their characteristic bent to men’s habits of thought. In the technology of handicraft the central fact is always the individual workman, whether in the crafts proper or in the petty trade. In that era industry is conceived in terms of the skill, initiative and application of the trained individual, and human relations outside of the workshop tend also by force of habit to be conceived in similar terms of self-sufficient individuals, each working out his own ends in severalty.

The position of the craftsman in the economy of that time is peculiarly suited to induce a conception of the individual workman as a creative agent standing on his own bottom, and as an ultimate, irreducible factor in the community’s make-up. He draws on the resources of his own person alone; neither his ancestry nor the favour of his neighbours have visibly yielded him anything beyond an equivalent for work done; he owes nothing to inherited wealth or prerogative, and he is bound in no relation of landlord or tenant to the soil. With his slight outfit of tools he is ready and competent of his own motion to do the work that lies before him, and he asks nothing but an even chance to do what he is fit to do. Even the training which has given him his finished skill he has come by through no special favour or advantage, having given an equivalent for it all in the work done during his apprenticeship and so having to all appearance acquired it by his own force and diligence. The common stock of technological knowledge underlying all special training was at that time still a sufficiently simple and obvious matter, so that it was readily acquired in the routine of work, without formal application to the learning of it; and any indebtedness to the community at large or to past generations for such common stock of information would therefore not be sufficiently apparent to admit of its disturbing the craftsman’s naïve appraisal of his productive capacity in the simple and complacent terms of his own person.

The man who does things, who is creatively occupied with fashioning things for use, is the central fact in the scheme of things under the handicraft system, and the range of concepts by use of which the technological problems of that era are worked out is limited by the habit of mind so induced in those who have the work in hand and in those who see it done. The discipline of the crafts inculcates the apprehension of mechanical facts and processes in terms of workmanlike endeavour and achievement; so that questions as to what forces are available for use, and of how to turn them to account, present themselves in terms of muscular force and manual dexterity. Mechanical appliances for use in industry are designed and worked out as contrivances to facilitate or to abridge manual labour, and it is in terms of labour that the whole industrial system is conceived and its incidence, value and output rated.

Such a fashion of conceiving the operations and appliances of industry seems at the same time to fall in closely with men’s natural bent as given by the native instinct of workmanship; and fostered by the consistent drift of daily routine under the handicraft system this attitude grew into matter of course, and has continued to direct men’s thinking on industrial matters even long after the era of handicraft has passed and given place to the factory system and the large machine industry. So much so that throughout the nineteenth century, in economic speculations as well as in popular speech, the mechanical plant employed in industry has habitually been spoken of as “labour saving devices;” even such palpable departures from the manual workmanship of handicraft as the power loom, the smelting furnace, artificial waterways and highways, the steam engine and telegraphic apparatus, have been so classed.

There need be no question but that these phenomena of the machine era will bear such an interpretation; the point of interest here is that such an interpretation should have been resorted to and should have commended itself as adequate and satisfactory when applied to these mechanical facts whose effective place in technology and in its bearing on the economy of human life has turned out to be so widely different from that range of manual operations with which it is so sought to assimilate them.124

The discipline of the handicraft industry enforces an habitual apprehension of mechanical forces and processes in terms of manual workmanship,—muscular force and craftsmanlike manipulation. This discipline touches first, and most intimately and coercively, the classes engaged in the manual work of industry, but it also necessarily pervades the community at large and gathers in its net all individuals and classes who have to do with the facts of industry, near or remote. It gives its specific character to the habits of life of the community that lives under its dispensation and by its means, and so it acts as an overruling formative guide in shaping the current habits of thought.

The consequences of this habitual attitude, for the technology of the machine era that presently follows, are worth noting. The mechanical inventions and expedients that lead over from the era of handicraft, through what has been called the industrial revolution, to the later system of large industry, bear the marks of their handicraft origin. The early devices of the machine industry are uniformly contrivances for performing by mechanical means the same motions which the craftsmen in the given industries performed by hand and by man power; in great part, indeed, they set out with being contrivances to enable the workmen to perform the same manual operation in duplicate or multiple—(as in the early spinning and weaving machinery) or to perform a given operation with larger effect than was possible to the unaided muscular work (as in the beginnings of steam power). In their beginnings the new mechanical appliances are conceived as improved tools, which extend the reach and power of the workman or which facilitate or lighten the manual operations in which he spends himself. They are, as they aim to be, labour saving devices, designed to further the workmanlike efficiency of the men in whose hands they are placed.

The early history of steam power shows how closely this workmanlike conception limited the range of invention. It was first employed to pump water out of mines. In this use the pressure of the air on a piston, in a low-pressure cylinder, was brought to bear on a lever so suspended as to yield formally the same motion as a like lever previously moved by human muscle. After a long interval, sufficiently long to make the use of this intermittent pressure and the resulting reciprocating motion familiar and impersonal in men’s habitual apprehension, the reciprocating motion was turned to use to produce a rotary motion,—after the fashion suggested by the treadle of a lathe or spinning wheel, which was already familiar enough to have been divested of something of that fog of personality that had doubtless surrounded it at its first invention.125 The next serious move in the development of the steam engine is the invention of the automatic valves, for admission and escape of steam from the cylinder. According to the ancient myth, a boy whose work it was to shift the valves by hand, contrived to connect them by cords with the moving parts of the machine in such a way as to lift them at the proper moment by the motion of the machine itself; so making the machine perform what had in the original concept of the valve mechanism been a manual operation. Later still, after the due interval for externalisation and assimilation of this mechanical valve movement as an impersonal fact of the machine process, further improvement and elaboration of the elements so gained has worked out in the highly finished mechanism familiar to later times.

Detail scrutiny of any one of the greater mechanical inventions, or series of inventions, will bring out something of the same character as is seen in the sequence of successive gains that make up the history of the steam engine. It is to be noted in this connection that time appears to be of the essence of the process of mechanical invention in any field; so much so, indeed, that it will commonly be found that any single inventor contributes but one radical innovation in any one particular connection; which may then presently be taken up again as a securely objective element by a later inventor and pushed forward by a new move as radical as that to which this original invention owed its origin. This time interval which plays such a part in mechanical inventions appears necessary only as an interval of habituation, for the due externalisation of the element, to relieve it, by neglect, of the personal equation with which it is contaminated as it first comes into use, and so to leave it such an objective concept as may be turned to account as mere technological raw material.

It appears, then, that the accumulation of technological experience is not of itself sufficient to bring out a consecutive improvement of the industrial arts, particularly not such an advance in the industrial arts as is embodied in the machine technology of late-modern times. In this modern machine technology the ruling norm is the highly impersonal, not to say brutal, concept of mechanical process, blind and irresponsible. The logic of this technology, accordingly, is the logic of the machine process,—a logic of masses, velocities, strains and thrusts, not of personal dexterity, tact, training, and routine. In the degree in which the information that comes to hand comes encumbered with a teleological bias, a connotation of personal bent, it is unavailable or refractory under this logic. But all new information is infused with such an anthropomorphic colouring of personality; which may presently decay and give place to a more objective habitual apprehension of the facts in case use and wont play up the mechanical character and bearing of these facts in subsequent experience of them; or which may on the other hand end by giving its definitive character and value to the acquired information in case it should happen that the facts of experience are by use and wont bent to an habitual anthropomorphic rating and employment. To serve the needs of this machine technology, therefore, the information which accumulates must in some measure be divested of its naïve personal colouring by use and wont; and the degree in which this effect is had is a measure of the degree of availability of the resulting facts for the uses of the machine technology. The larger the available body of information of this character, and the more comprehensive and unremitting the share taken by the discipline of the machine process in the routine of daily life, therefore, the greater, other things equal, will be the rate of advance in the technological mastery of mechanical facts.

But much else goes to the make-up of use and wont besides the routine of industry and the utilisation of those mechanical processes and that output of goods which the modern machine industry places at men’s disposal. To put the same thing in terms already employed in another connection, the sense of workmanship is still subject to contamination with other impulsive elements of human nature working under the constraining limitations imposed by divers conventional canons and principles of conduct; besides being constantly subject to self-contamination in the way of an anthropomorphic interpretation that construes the facts of experience in terms of a craftsmanlike bent.

As bearing on the effectual reach of this self-contamination of the sense of workmanship it is pertinent to recall that craftsmanship ran within a class, and so had the benefit of that accentuated sentiment of self-complacency that comes of class consciousness. From its beginnings down to the period of its dissolution the handicraft industry is an affair of the lower classes; and, as is well known, class feeling runs strong throughout the era, particularly through the centuries of its best development. Whether their conceit is wholly a naïve self-complacency or partly a product of affectation, the sentiment is well in evidence and marks the attitude of the handicraft community with a characteristic bias. The craftsmen habitually rate themselves as serviceable members of the community and contrast themselves in this respect with the other orders of society who are not occupied with the production of things serviceable for human use. To the creative workman who makes things with his hands belongs an efficiency and a merit of a peculiarly substantial and definitive kind, he is the type and embodiment of efficiency and serviceability. The other orders of society and other employments of time and effort may of course be well enough in their way, but they lack that substantial ground of finality which the craftsman in his genial conceit arrogates to himself and his work. And so good a case does the craftsman make out on this head, and so convincingly evident is the efficiency of the skilled workman, and so patent is his primacy in the industrial community, that by the close of the era much the same view has been accepted by all orders of society.

Such a bias pervading the industrial community must greatly fortify the native bent to construe all facts of observation in anthropomorphic terms. But the training given by the petty trade of the handicraft era, on the other hand, is not altogether of this character. The itinerant merchant’s huckstering, as well as the buying and selling in which all members of the community were concerned, would doubtless throw the personal strain into the foreground and would act to keep the self-regarding sentiments alert and active and accentuate an individualistic appreciation of men and things. But the habit of rating things in terms of price has no such tendency, and the price concept gains ground throughout the period. Wherever the handicraft system reaches a fair degree of development the daily life of the community comes to centre about the market and to take on the character given by market relations. The volume of trade grows greater, and purchase and sale enter more thoroughly into the details of the work to be done and of the livelihood to be got by this work. The price system comes into the foreground. With the increase of traffic, book-keeping comes into use among the merchants; and as fast as the practice of habitual recourse to the market grows general, the uncommercial classes also become familiar with the rudimentary conceptions of book-keeping, even if they do not make much use of formal accounts in their own daily affairs.126

The logic and concepts of accountancy are wholly impersonal and dispassionate; and whether men’s use of its logic and concepts takes the elaborate form of a set of books or the looser fashion of an habitual rating of gains, losses, income, and outgo in terms of price, its effect is unavoidably in some degree to induce a statistical habit of mind. It makes immediately for an exact quantitative apprehension of all things and relations that have a pecuniary bearing; and more remotely, by force of the pervasive effect of habituation, it makes for a greater readiness to apprehend all facts in a similarly objective and statistical fashion, in so far as the facts admit of a quantitative rating. Accountancy is the beginning of statistics, and the price concept is a type of the objective impersonal, quantitative apprehension of things. Coincidently, because they do not lend themselves to this facile rating, facts that will not admit of a quantitative statement and statistical handling decline in men’s esteem, considered as facts, and tend in some degree to lose the cogency which belongs to empirical reality. They may even come to be discounted as being of a lower order of reality, or may even be denied factual value.

Doubtless, the price system had much to do with the rise of the machine technology in modern times; not only in that the accountancy of price offered a practical form and method of statistical computation, such as is indispensable to anything that may fairly be classed as engineering, but also and immediately and substantially in that its discipline has greatly conduced to the apprehension of mechanical facts in terms not coloured by an imputed anthropomorphic bent. It has probably been the most powerful factor acting positively in early modern times to divest mechanical facts of that imputed workmanlike bent given them by habits of thought induced by the handicrafts.

This reduction of the facts of observation to quantitative and objective terms is perhaps most visible not in the changes that come over the technology of industry directly, in early modern times, but rather in that growth of material science that runs along as a concomitant of the expansion of the mechanical industry during the later era of handicraft. The material sciences, particularly those occupied with mechanical phenomena, are closely related to the technology of the mechanical industries, both in their subject matter and in the scope and method of the systematisation of knowledge at which they aim; and it is in these material sciences that the concomitance is best seen, at the same time that it is the advance achieved in these sciences that most unequivocally marks the transition from mediæval to modern habits of thought. This modern interest in matter-of-fact knowledge and the consequent achievements in material science, comes to an effectual head wherever and so soon, as the handicraft industry has made a considerable advance, in volume and in technological mastery, sufficient to support a fair volume of trade and make thoughtful men passably familiar with the statistical conceptions of the price system.

It is accordingly in the commercial republics of Italy that the modern growth of material science takes its first start, about the point of time when industry and commerce had reached their most flourishing state on the Mediterranean seaboard and when the attention of these communities was already swinging off from these material interests to high-handed politics and religious reaction. The higher interests of church and state came to the front, and science, industry, and presently commerce dwindled and decayed in the land that had promised so handsomely to lead Western civilisation out of the underbrush of piety and princely intrigue.

Next followed the Low Countries, with the south German industrial centres, where again industry of the handicraft order grew great, gave rise to trade on a rapidly increasing scale, and presently to an era of business enterprise of unprecedented spirit and scope. But the age of the Fuggers closed in bankruptcy and industrial collapse when the princely wrangles of the era of statemaking had used up the resources of the industrial community and exhausted the credit of that generation of captains of industry. Here too religious contention came in for its share in the set-back of industry and commerce. In their economic outlines the two cases are very much of the same kind. Central Europe ran through much the same cycle of industrial growth, commercial enterprise, princely ambitions, dynastic wars, religious fanaticism, exhaustion and insecurity, and industrial collapse and decay,—substantially repeating, on an enlarged scale and with much added detail, the sequence that had brought South Europe into arrears. Meantime the material sciences had come forward again in the West, and flourished at the hands of the Netherlanders, South Germans and French scholars, who under the favouring discipline of this new advance in industry and commerce had slowly come abreast of the same matter-of-fact conceptions that had once made Italy the home of modern science. And here again, as before, princely politics, with the attendant war, exactions and insecurity, followed presently by religious controversies and persecutions, not only put an end to the advance of industry and business but also checked the attendant development of science nearly to a standstill.

So that when a further move of the kind is presently made it is the British community that takes the lead. Great Britain had been in arrears in all those respects that make up civilisation of the Occidental kind, and not least in the material respect; until the time when the peoples of the Continent by their own act fell into the rear in respect of those material interests—technology and business enterprise—which afford the material ground out of which the Occidental type of civilisation has grown. In Great Britain the sequence of these cultural phenomena has not been substantially different, taken by and large, from that which had previously been run through by the Continental communities; except that the same outcome was not reached, apparently because the sequence was not interrupted by collapse at the same critical point in the development.

The run of events under the handicraft system in England differs in certain consequential features from that among the Continental peoples,—consequential for the purposes of this inquiry, whether of similarly grave consequence from the point of view given by any other and larger interest. These peculiar traits of the British era of handicraft yield a side light on the methods and reach of the handicraft discipline as a factor in civilisation at large, at the same time that a consideration of them should go to show how slender an initial difference may come to be decisive of the outcome in case circumstances give this initial difference a cumulative effect.

As regards the ultimately substantial grounds of the British situation, in the way of racial make-up, natural resources, and cultural antecedents, the British community has no singular advantage or disadvantage as against its Continental competitors. What is true of England in respect of peculiarly favourable natural resources later on, about and after the close of the era of handicraft, does not hold for the beginnings or the best days of that era. Racially there is no appreciable difference between the English population of that time and the population of the Low Countries, of the Scandinavian peninsulas, or even of the nearer lying German territories; and no markedly characteristic national type of temperament had at that time been developed in Great Britain, as against the temperamental make-up of its Continental neighbours,—whatever may be conceived to have become the case in the nearer past.

The characteristic, and apparently decisive, peculiarities of the British situation may all confidently be traced to the insular position of the country. Owing to the isolation so given to the Island the British community was notably in arrears in early modern times, as contrasted with the more cultured, populous and wealthier peoples of the Continent; and this backward state of England in the earlier period of the era of handicraft is no less marked in respect of technology than in any other. As is well known, England borrowed extensively and persistently from its Continental neighbours throughout the era, and it was only by help of these borrowed elements that the English were able to overtake and finally to take the lead of their competitors. Similarly, the British commercial development also comes on late as compared with the Continent; so much so that the British had substantially no share in the great expansion of business enterprise that has been called the Age of the Fuggers. This late start of the English, coupled with their peculiar advantage in being able to borrow what their neighbours had worked out, conduced to a more rapid rate and shorter run of industrial advance and expansion in the Island, and so, among other consequences, hindered the rounded system of handicraft, industrial towns, and gild organisation from attaining the same degree of finality, and ultimately of obstructive inertia, that resulted in many of the Continental countries.

Again, owing to the same geographic isolation that long held England culturally in arrears, the English community lay, in great measure, outside of that political “concert of nations” that worked out the exhaustion and collapse of industry and business on the Continent. Not that the English took no interest in the grand whirl of politics and princely war that occupied the main body of Christendom in that time. The English crown, or to use a foreign expression, the English State, was deeply enough implicated in the political intrigues of late mediæval and early modern Europe; but as modern time has advanced the English community has visibly hung back with an ever growing reluctance. And whatever may be conceived to be the share of the English crown in the political complications of the Continent, it remains true that the English community at large, during the mature and concluding phases of the era of handicraft, stood mainly and habitually outside of these princely concerns.127 In effect, after the handicraft era was well under way, England is never for long or primarily engaged in international war, nor, except for the civil war of the Commonwealth period, in destructive war of any kind. Hence the era runs to a different outcome in England from what it does elsewhere. It ends not in the exhaustion of politics, but in the industrial revolution. The close of the handicraft system in England comes by way of a technological revolution, not by collapse.

To this attempted explanation of the English case, as due to its geographic isolation, the objection may well suggest itself that other cases which parallel the British in this respect do not show like results. So, for instance, the Scandinavian countries enjoyed an isolation nearly if not quite as effective as that of Great Britain during this period of history; whereas the outcome in these countries is notoriously not the same. The Scandinavian case, however, differs in at least one essential respect, which seems decisive even apart from secondary circumstances. These countries were too small to make up a self-supporting community under the conditions required by the system of handicraft. They had neither the population nor the natural resources on such a scale as a passably full development of the handicraft system required. At any advanced stage of its growth the system can work out into a self-balanced technological organisation, with full specialisation of labour and local differentiation of industry, only in a community of a certain (considerable) size. This condition was not met by the Scandinavian countries. Hence they remained in a relatively backward state, on the whole, through the handicraft era, and never reached anything like an independent position in the industrial world of that time, either technologically or in point of commercial development; hence also they failed to achieve or maintain that degree of independence, or isolation, in their political relations that left England free to pursue a self-directed course of material development.

At an earlier period, as, for instance, from neolithic times down to the close of paganism, under the slighter, less differentiated, less complex technological conditions of a more primitive state of the industrial arts, the Scandinavian countries had, each and several, proved large enough for a very efficient industrial organisation; and, again, during the early historical period they had also proved to be of a sufficient and suitable size to make up national units of a thoroughly competent sort, autonomous politically as well as industrially and working out their own fortunes in severalty,—very much as the British community does later on, in the days of the later handicraft era and the early growth of the machine industry. But during the era of handicraft, and indeed somewhat in a progressive fashion as the technology of that era grew to a fuller development and required larger territorial dimensions, the Scandinavian countries lost ground, relatively to the larger communities of Great Britain and the Continent; in a degree they progressively lost autonomy both in the political and the industrial respect, and much the same is to be said for their position in point of general culture. This falling into arrears and dependence is least marked in the case of Sweden, the largest and still passably isolated community among them; and it is most marked in the case of Norway and Iceland, the most isolated but at the same time the least sizable units of the Scandinavian group. In material sciences, that most characteristic trait of the Western culture, the case of these peoples is much the same as in the matter of technology and cultural autonomy at large; the largest of them has the most to show.

Great Britain, on the other hand, fulfilled the conditions of size and isolation demanded in order to a free development of the industrial arts during this era, when the traffic in dynastic politics stood ready to absorb all accessible resources of industry and sentiment. And England accordingly takes the lead when the era of handicraft goes out and that of the new technology comes in.

Material science of the modern sort has been drawn into the discussion as a cultural phenomenon closely bound up with the state of the industrial arts under the handicraft system. This modern science may, indeed, be taken as the freest manifestation of that habit of mind that comes to its more concrete expression in the technology of the time. To show the pertinency of such a recourse to the state of science as an outcome of the discipline exercised by the routine of life in the era of handicraft some further detail touching the state and progress of scientific inquiry during that period will be in place.

In its beginnings, the theoretical postulates and preconceptions of modern science are drawn from the scholastic speculations of the late Middle Ages; the problems which the new science undertook to handle, on the other hand, were, by and large, such concrete and material questions as the current difficulties of technology brought to the notice of the investigators. These traditional postulates, preconceptions, canons, and logical methods that stood over from the past were essentially of a theological complexion, and were the outcome of much time, attention and insight spent on the systematisation of knowledge in a cultural situation whose substantial core was the relation of master and servant, and under the guidance of a theological bias worked out on the same ground. The postulates of this speculative body of knowledge and the preconceptions with which the scholastic speculators went to their work of systematisation, accordingly, are of a highly anthropomorphic character; but it is not the anthropomorphism of workmanship, at least not in the naïve form which the sense of workmanship gives to anthropomorphic interpretation among more primitive peoples.128 It may be taken as a matter of course that the sense of workmanship is present in its native, direct presentment throughout the intellectual life of the middle ages, as it necessarily is under all the permutations of human culture; but it is equally a matter of course that the promptings of an unsophisticated sense of workmanship do not afford the final test of what is right and good in a cultural situation drawn on rigid lines of mastery and submission.

During the middle ages the faith had taken on an extremely authoritative and coercive character, to answer to the similar principles of organisation and control that ruled in secular affairs; so that at the transition to modern times the religious cult of Christendom was substantially a cult of fearsome subjection and arbitrary authority. Much else, of a more genial character, was of course comprised in the principles of the faith of that time, but when all is said the fact remains that even in its genial traits it was a cult of irresponsible authority and abject submission,—a cult of the pastoral-predatory type, adapted and perfected to answer the circumstances of feudal Europe, and so embodying the principles (habits of thought) that characterised the feudal system.

Notoriously, the fashions of religious faith change tardily. Such change is always of the nature of concession. And since the conceptions of the cult are of no material consequence, taken by themselves and in their direct incidence, they are subject, as such, to no direct or deliberate control or correction in behalf of the community’s material interests or its technological requirements. It is almost if not altogether by force of their consonance or dissonance with the prevailing habits of thought inculcated by the routine of life that any given run of religious verities find acceptance, command general adherence to their teaching, or become outworn and are discarded; and such lack of consonance must become very pronounced before a radical change of the kind in question will take effect. Barring conversion to a new faith, it is commonly by insensible shifts of adaptation and reconstruction that any wide-reaching change is worked out in these fundamental conceptions. Such was the character of the move by which the Mediæval cult merged in the modernised theological concepts of a later age.

Gradually, by force of unremitting habituation to a new scheme of life, and marked by long-drawn theological polemics, a change passed over the spirit of theological speculation, whereby the fundamentals of the faith were infused with the spirit of the handicraft system, and the preconceptions of workmanship insensibly supplanted those of mastery and subservience in the working concepts of devout Christendom. Meantime, while the routine of the era of handicraft was slowly reconstructing the current conceptions of divinity on lines consonant with the habit of mind of workmanship, the ancient conceptions continued with gradually abating force to assert their prescriptive dominion over men’s habitual thinking. This gradually loosening hold of the ancient conceptions is best seen in the speculations of the philosophers and in the higher generalisations of scientific inquiry in early modern times.

In the mediæval speculations whether theological, philosophical or scientific, the search for truth runs back to the authentic ground of the religious verities,—largely to revealed truth; and these religious verities run back to the question, “What hath God ordained?” In the course of the era of handicraft this ultimate question of knowledge came to take the form, “What hath God wrought?” Not that the creative office of God in the divine economy was overlooked or in any degree intentionally made light of by the earlier speculators; nor that the sovereignty of God was denied or in any degree questioned by those devout inquirers who carried forward the work in later time. But in that earlier phase of faith and inquiry it is distinctly the suzerainty of God, and His ordinances, that afford the ground of finality on which all inquiry touching the economy of this world ultimately come to rest; and in the later phase, as seen at the close of the era of handicraft, it is as distinctly His creative office and the logic of His creative design that fill the place of an ultimate term in human inquiry—as that inquiry conventionally runs within the spiritual frontiers of Christendom. God had not ceased to be the Heavenly King, and had not ceased to be glorified with the traditional phrases of homage as the Most High, the Lord of Hosts etc., but somewhat incongruously He had also come to be exalted as the Great Artificer—the preternatural craftsman. The vulgar habits of thought bred in the workday populace by the routine of the workshop and the market place had stolen their way into the sanctuary and the counsels of divinity.

Similarly, in the best days of scholastic learning scientific inquiry ran back for a secure foundation to the authentic ordinances of the Heavenly King; under the discipline of the era of handicraft it learned instead to push its inquiries to the ground of efficient cause, ultimately of course, in the philosophical liquidation of accounts in that devout age, to the creative efficiency of the First Cause. In the scientific inquiries of the earlier age the test of truth was the test of authenticity, and the logic of systematisation by use of which knowledge in that time was digested and stored away was essentially a logic of subsumption under securely authentic categories that could be run back at need to the ascertained requirements of the glory of God. The canon of truth is that of the revealed word, reënforced and filled out with the quasi-divine Aristotelian scheme of things. It is a logic of hierarchical congruity in respect of potencies and qualities, suggestively resembling the devolution of powers and dignities under the finished scheme of feudalism. In the later age the good of man gradually, insensibly supplants the glory of God as the ultimate ground of systematisation. The sentimental ground of conviction comes to be the recognised serviceability of the ascertained facts for human use, rather than their conformity with the putative exigencies of a self-centred divine will. The Providential Order that means so much in the scheme of knowledge in the mature years of the era of handicraft is an order imposed by a providentially beneficent Creator who looks to the good of man; as it has been expressed, it is a scheme of “humanism.”

By the close of the era this beneficent providential order had worked out in an Order of Nature, indued with the same meliorative trend; and in the sentimental conviction of the inquiring spirits of that age it lay in the nature of this beneficent order of the universe that in the end, in the finished product of its working, it would bring about the highest practicable state of well-being for man,—very much as any skilled workman of sound sense and a good heart would turn out good and serviceable goods. And in this Order of Nature, as it runs in the matter-of-course convictions of thoughtful men at the close of the era, the person of the deity, even as a workmanlike creative Providence, had fallen into the background. The Order of Nature, with its scheme of Natural Law, is felt as the work of a consummately skilful and ingenious workmanlike agency that looks to a serviceable end to be accomplished; and the profoundly thoughtful scientific inquiry of that time harbours no doubt that this workmanlike agency of Nature at large rules the world of visible fact and will achieve its good work in good time. But this quasi-personal Nature is not reverenced for anything but its workmanlike qualities; the awe which it inspires is not the fear of God, such as that fear has played its part under the feudalistic rule of the church and sent men hunting cover from the imminent wrath to come. As he stands in the presence of this eighteenth-century Nature, man is not primarily a sinner seeking a remission of penalties at all costs, but rather a focus of workmanlike attention upon whose welfare all the forces of the visible universe beneficently converge.

How this workmanlike Nature goes about her129 work is no more plain to the casual spectator than are the recondite processes of high-wrought handicraft to the uninstructed. But Nature after all accomplishes her ends in a workmanlike fashion, and by staying by and patiently watching the operations of Nature and construing the facts of observation by the sympathetic use of a rational common sense men may learn much of the methods of her manipulation as well as of the rules of procedure under whose guidance the works of Nature are accomplished. For it is a matter of course to that generation that Nature is essentially rational in her aims and logic as well as in the technology of her work; very much after the fashion of the master craftsman, who goes to his work with an intelligent oversight of the available means and the purpose to be wrought out, as well as with a firm and facile touch on all that passes under his trained hand. Like the perfect craftsman, “Nature never makes mistakes,” “never makes a jump,” “never does anything in vain,” “never turns out anything but perfect work.”

The means whereby this work of Nature is brought to its consummate issue are forces of Nature working under her Laws by the method of cause and effect. The principle, or “law,” of causation is a metaphysical postulate; in the sense that such a fact as causation is unproved and unprovable. No man has ever observed a case of causation, as is a commonplace with the latterday psychologists. But such a doubt does not present itself seriously in the days of handicraft; it would be out of touch with the spirit of the time and the discipline of that craftsmanship out of which the spirit of the time arises. To the inquiring minds of that era it is a matter of course and of common sense that the forces of Nature are seen to work out the effects which emerge before their eyes. What they see in fact may be, as the modern psychologists would perhaps say, a certain concomitance and sequence in the observed phenomena; but what those observers see in effect is always a certain cause working out a certain effect. The imputation of causal efficiency to the observed phenomena is so thoroughly a matter of course that there is no sense of imputation in the observer’s mind.

Observation simply, without imputation of anthropomorphic qualities and efficacies, should yield nothing more to the purpose than idle concomitance and sequence of phenomena, but there is, in effect, none of this early scientific work done in terms of simple concomitance or sequence alone; nor for that matter, has any of the effective (theoretical) work of modern science been carried to an issue by the use of such objective terms of concomitance and sequence alone, whether in that or in a later age, without the help of a putative causal nexus. Through the early modern scientific period there runs an increasingly free and frequent recourse to statistical argument,—in the material sciences a recourse to punctilious measurement, enumeration and instruments of precision; but it is of the essence of the case that the phenomenal facts which so are subjected to measurement and statistical computation are facts selected for the purpose on the strength of their (putatively) known causal implication in the problem whose solution is sought, and that the facts which emerge from these measurements, computations, and instruments of precision, are turned to account in an argument of cause and effect; they have served their purpose only when and in so far as they enable the inquirer to determine the course of efficient transition from a putative cause to a putative effect, or conversely.

The relation of cause and effect, as commonly conceived by the vulgar and as commonly employed by the scientist, is a putative relation between phenomena which can not be said to stand in any observed relation of efficiency to one another. Efficiency, as understood in this connection, is not a fact of observation, but of imputation; and efficiency, performance of work, is the substance of the causal relation as that concept is universally employed in modern science. It may well be said that this recourse to the concept of efficient cause—a metaphysical postulate touching a putative fact—is the distinguishing characteristic of modern science as contrasted with any other scheme of systematised knowledge.130

Not only does the development of modern science rest on this postulate of causality, but the concept of causation which so characterises the modern sciences is of a particular and restricted kind. At least on the face of things it seems unquestionable that the peculiar temper and limitations of this modern European concept of causation are to be credited to the habits wrought out by a life under the handicraft system. It has been noted already that the ubiquitous prevalence of trade and of the price system in modern times has given to the modern apprehension of facts a certain objectivity, a degree of impersonality, which is at least a characteristic of modern knowledge, whether scientific or commonplace, even if it cannot be said to be a unique distinction of modern science as contrasted with other deliberate systems of knowledge. But it is the unique distinction of modern science, particularly as it comes into view in its early phases, that its concept of causality is drawn not simply in terms of workmanship but specifically in terms of craftsmanship. There need probably be no argument spent on the thesis that the sense of causality is, by and large, a particular manifestation of the sense of workmanship. But the sense of workmanship in its native scope apparently covers something more than the manual efficiency of the skilled workman simply. And in other times and under other cultural (technological) circumstances the sense of workmanship has apparently given rise to concepts of causation of a wider, or at least of a looser, scope. In the naïve rating of savage peoples workmanship appears to cover, perhaps uncertainly, notions of generation, nurture, tendance, and the like, without any sharp line being drawn between these various lines of effective endeavour on the one side and manual efficiency on the other. And so, on the other hand, in the cosmological knowledge (or quasi-knowledge) current among these peoples explanation in terms of generation and growth are accepted as final along with explanations in terms of what the modern man would conceive to be the stricter sense of cause and effect. Even in the speculations of the sages of classical antiquity, and again in the cosmologies and natural history of the far-Oriental peoples, many questions of cause and effect are found to be sufficiently disposed of when worked out in the like terms of generation, growth and quasi-physiological mutation.

To modern inquiry explanations in these terms, other than those of physically effective work, are provisional at the best, and are held to only as awaiting a final solution in a materially, mechanistically competent way. And what is alone materially competent in the modern scientific apprehension is such an explanation as will make things plain in terms of matter and motion, working a change in the constitution of things by displacement through contact and pressure. Causation is conceived as manual work,—to use a French term, it is a remaniement of raw materials at hand. Physiological or chemical explanations must finally be recast in terms of physics, to satisfy the modern scientist’s sense of finality, and physics must be made to run in terms of impact, pressure, displacement in space, regrouping of material particles, coördinated movements and a shifting of equilibrium.

Through all this runs the concomitant requirement of quantivalence, statable in statistical form. The scientist’s results are not finally merchantable, on the scientific exchange, until they have been reduced to such terms of accountancy as would be comprehensible to the man trained in the merchandising traffic of the petty trade, for whose conviction things must be punctiliously rated in exchange value. But, as has been noted above, it is only as an expedient of scientific accountancy that the facts under inquiry are kept account of in an itemised bill of values. This meticulous statistical accountancy is necessary to safeguard the accuracy of the work done and its conformity with the facts in hand; but the work so done handles these facts as active factors which go efficiently to the production of the results observed. The cause is conceived to produce the effect, somewhat after the fashion in which a skilled workman produces a finished article of trade. But when the scientist has set forth the operations and working conditions that have brought forth the effects which he is engaged in explaining, he must also, in order to the conviction of his fellow craftsmen, show a statistically itemised statement of receipts and expenditures covering the facts engaged,—in quantitative values he must show that the costs are balanced by the values that emerge in the finished product of that workmanlike process of causation whose recondite nature and course he has so laid bare to the light of understanding.

This attempted characterisation of modern scientific inquiry and its working concepts applies immediately to the earlier phases and down to a date well past the advent of the machine industry,—so far past that date as to allow time and experience to work the new habits of thought peculiar to the machine technology into the texture of men’s preconceptions. In time, but tardily, as is the case with the pervasive effects of any new line of habituation, the discipline of the machine has wrought a further, though, hitherto less profound and decisive, change in the aims and methods of science; a discussion of which is deferred until it comes up again in its connection with the new technology. Less cogently and with qualifications, however, the above characterisation will apply to the later phases of modern science, as well as to that initial stage that marks the era of handicraft.