CHAPTER X
MECHANISM

Automatic. Spring. Species. Cause. Agnostic. Unction. Spiritualism. Humanitarianism.

The two most interesting points about the above passage are firstly, that it was written, not by an engineer, but by a natural scientist; and secondly, that the title of the essay from which it is taken is Capital and Labour. That is to say, the abundance of mechanical simile in it is neither the natural colouring of an imagination subdued to what it works in, nor a deliberate system of metaphors fabricated with the object of figuring forth a biological process to the uninitiated. On the contrary, the notion of child-birth is itself only introduced for the purpose of illustration. The images by which it is conveyed are thus revealed as the natural furniture of the writer’s imagination. They can no longer have been images to him, but rather his normal outlook on the chain of facts in which he was most interested; and the passage is, of course, only one of thousands in which we can see nineteenth-century imagination working in a similar way.

It would be of small general interest to give a list of all the mechanical and technical words which had come into our vocabulary since the middle of the seventeenth century—words like calculus, centrifugal, dynamic, galvanize, inertia, momentum, oscillate, polarity, reciprocating, rotate, vibrate (except in the sense ‘to brandish’),[55]... We are concerned more with their influence on the meanings of older words. And from this point of view the passage quoted from Huxley can indeed give us a fair idea of the untold changes that were secretly brewing when, for instance, the word mechanic (Greek ‘mēchanē’, a ‘device’, or ‘contrivance’) lost its old meaning of ‘pertaining to manual labour’, and began to be applied to machines. This happened in the seventeenth century, when also the word machine, which had formerly been used of plots and intrigues, or for any kind of erection, was first used with its modern meaning. We begin to hear of the six “Mechanick Faculties” or “Simple Machines”, i.e. the Balance, Lever, Pulley, Screw, Wedge, and Wheel; and in a little book called Mathematicall Magick, by Bishop Wilkins, one of the first members of the Royal Society, these are discussed with great enthusiasm and many respectful references to Aristotle. It is in the same work that we first hear in English of a science of Mechanics. This new science, foreshadowed to some extent by Aristotle, from whose treatise with that title we take the word, had quickly been carried farther by his successor, Archimedes. Most civilizations seem to have produced towards their close mechanical devices of one kind or another, but more especially “engines” of war. What distinguishes our own is the way in which mechanism has gradually entered into our outlook—a fact which is marked, among other things, by our use of the Greek prefix ‘auto-’ (self) for things worked by machinery. In a Greek dictionary we find upwards of two hundred words beginning with this prefix, but not one of them is applied to anything mechanical.

Let us consider the word automatic. The Greek ‘automatos’, which meant ‘self-moved’,[56] was Latinized in the form ‘automatus’ at about the beginning of our era, and automatous—now obsolete—is actually found in the works of the seventeenth-century writer, Sir Thomas Browne. This old adjective had the sense of “spontaneous”, “of one’s own free will”, and was used of the animal and vegetable worlds as opposed to the mineral, or of events which came about “by chance”; while in Plato’s philosophy the distinction between that which is “self-moved”, and that which can only be moved by something outside itself had been taken as the very antithesis between spirit and matter, between eternal and perishable. Automatic is first found in English in the eighteenth century. The earliest quotation given by the Oxford Dictionary is taken from David Hartley, who wrote in 1748:

In 1802 Paley pointed out “the difference between an animal and an automatic statue”, and sixty years later a writer on physics, after speaking of the amoeba as being “irritable and automatic”, added a note to the effect that—

The reason for this semantic volte face may perhaps be detected in the history of the parallel word automaton. This had long ago (about 10 B.C.) been applied to the few primitive mechanical devices which Aryan civilization had then evolved, and its appearance in English seems to have preceded that of automatic by nearly two centuries, as it is found in 1611 describing “a picture of a gentlewoman” made with eyes that open and shut. Then, later on in the same century, it began to be applied to clocks and watches, and there seems every reason to suppose that the presence of this particular kind of apparent “self-mover” on so many mantelpieces and in so many vest-pockets must have determined the peculiarly dead and mechanical meaning which automatic now possesses.

The ancients measured time by the regulated flow of water. Striking clocks of some kind were known in Europe as far back as the twelfth or thirteenth century. But they seem to have been unreliable, costly, and rare until the discovery by Galileo of the “isochronism” of pendulums. Pendulum is first found in 1660, in Boyle’s writings, vibrate and vibration in 1667. The new toy seems to have taken hold of Europe’s imagination in the most extraordinary way. Both clockwork and mainspring were used figuratively the first time they are known to have been used in English at all, a sixteenth-century writer even anticipating Paley so far as to write:

We hear talk almost at once of the springs[57] of people’s actions. Descartes compared the souls of brutes to watches, and Leibnitz actually compared the souls and bodies of men to two watches! It seems as though the works had started going in our heads.

And since then, so far from stopping, they have accelerated, especially during the last century—to what extent it is difficult for us to realize fully, simply because it has all happened so recently. Differences of outlook on such matters as biology and physiology between ourselves and the Middle Ages we readily perceive, though we may not properly understand them; here we stand a long way off, and can often see quite plainly how the old words have altered their meanings. But from the way in which our great grandfathers used such words as energy, midriff, motor, muscle, nerve, respiration, work—to take examples only from the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter—we sometimes find it hard, even when we have traced the history of their meanings up to that date, to feel what different associations they must have called up to the generations which died before Huxley was born. At this time, thirty years after his death, it is only our own imagination, working introspectively on such a phrase as “nervous machinery”, and grasping, as it can do, how the meanings of the two words have been running into one another, which can bring this difference before us. When it has done so, we are again reminded of the simple yet striking truth that all knowledge which has been conveyed by means of speech to the reason has travelled in metaphors taken from man’s own activities and from the solid things which he handles. The present is no different from the past. Only the metaphors get buried deeper and deeper beneath one another; they interact more subtly, and do not always leave any outward trace on the language. It would be interesting, for example, were it possible, to discover just how much of the average man’s idea of blood circulation is due to the invention of that elementary mechanical device, the pump;[58] or how much of the mental image which he has formed of the interaction of muscle, nerve, and brain would fade from his consciousness if there were no such thing as the electric telegraph.

We think by means of words, and we have to use the same ones for so many different thoughts that as soon as new meanings have entered into one set, they creep into all our theories and begin to mould our whole cosmos; and from the theories they pass into more words, and so into our lives and institutions. Thus, not only were the Newtonian heavens the playground of just those forces which had been used for the working of the six “simple machines”, but Montesquieu insists that the English Whigs copied the new astronomy when they were creating the modern British Constitution. Referring to this in one of his essays, Woodrow Wilson drew attention to the fact that the Constitution of the United States had been made on the same principle. “They [writers in the Federalist] speak of the checks and balances of the Constitution,” he said, “and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system....” And we notice that the late President, when he went on to speak of reconstructing the Constitution, was fain to lean on another analogy, reminding his hearers that government is “not a machine, but a living thing”; that it is “modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life”; and again that it is a body of men “with highly differentiated functions”. In fact, we are merely launched into another set of metaphors, of which, however, the speaker is in this case conscious, for he explicitly affirms that government is “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton”.

Environment, evolution, development, instinct, species, spontaneous, variation are some of the more important words, whose modern meanings, if we look at their semantic history, are found to bear the unmistakable stamp of Darwinism, and we ought perhaps to add ooze[59] and slime.[59] To Darwin we should have to attribute the tendency of evolution to lose its etymological suggestion of a vegetable growth, an unfolding from the centre outwards. Species (Latin ‘species’, ‘form’ or ‘appearance’) was used by Cicero to translate Plato’s “Idea” (Chapter VI). It held an important place in the logic of the Middle Ages as one of the five “predicables” by which an object could be defined, and for centuries its biological meaning was only one among many. This particular interpretation did not begin to come into prominence until the eighteenth century, when Addison, for instance, used the phrase “the species” of the human race; but since Darwin published his Origin of Species (in which the word is, of course, given an exclusively biological sense) it has, for the ordinary man, had practically no other. It is interesting to observe that here again, as the words are commonly employed, the Latin form has grown more concrete and the Greek more abstract and intellectual.

But the change did not confine itself to such technical words as these. One has only to pick up a journalistic article on almost any subject and read it, endeavouring to let the words mean only what they did a hundred years ago, to see how the whole scheme of Natural Selection can lurk unseen, but not unfelt, behind some colourless little word like adapt, competition, gregarious, modification, protective, selection, and even animal, facts, law, life, man, Nature,... Or we can see it in the curious, absolute use of the word fit, in the sense of ‘physically healthy’, which, appearing first in the seventies, is obviously due to the famous phrase, the “survival of the fittest” (i.e. the fittest to survive in a struggle for existence). How modern the new meanings are may be gauged by the fact that the word heredity, the basic principle of modern natural scientific theory, is recorded by Francis Galton as having been considered “fanciful and unusual” in 1859, while atavism first appears in 1833.

But when a little more time has elapsed and the nineteenth century can be properly studied from the semantic point of view, there is little reason to doubt that the interfusion of mechanical and biological conceptions and the penetration of both into meaning will present one of its most striking features. One of the greatest triumphs of mechanism—greater than the Forth Bridge or the St. Gothard Tunnel—is the fact that it has wormed itself into the meaning of the word cause. This is, of course, a word which tends to alter its meaning a little every time it is used, and there is evidence that in former times, while there were separate words to express such separate ideas as “bringing to birth”, “making to grow”, “being guilty of”, ... there was no general term into which the one single essence common to all these relations had been distilled. The Greek and Latin words for cause, for example, were both closely connected from the earliest times with their legal procedure (cf. ac-cuse, etc., and the modern use of cause in the same sense). At some period, however—perhaps in the last two centuries before our era—such a concept must have been precipitated, and we find Cicero defining the Latin ‘causa’, with mathematical precision, simply as ‘that which effects the thing of which it is the cause’. The fascination which this abstraction exerted on the medieval imagination may be judged from the fact that the writer of a fifteenth-century treatise on Love introduced into it the sentence: “Every cause of a cause is cause of thing caused”; and we soon find the philosophers seeking through a “chain” of causes for that First Cause, which they identified with the Almighty. By the nineteenth century this thought-system of an abstract causality, brought about by means of abstract “laws”, lay, like an empty house, ready to be taken over by a new owner. The new owner was mechanism.

Under its influence even consciousness itself was, and still is, often conceived of as being caused by mechanical movements taking place within the body. We also find thought described as a function of the brain. This curious word had become extremely popular; and somewhere about the sixties the noun began to be used as a verb. We hear of nerves, brain, heart, ... functioning or refusing to function, an expression in which the mechanical flavour is especially strong.

Thus, in the light of words, the historical relation between mechanics and physiology looks not unlike that relation between mathematics and astronomy which was suggested in a previous chapter. We drew from out our own bodies, it would seem, the sense-experiences of force and pressure and the like,[60] on which mechanics are based; then we externalized them in tools and machines, and turned them into abstract “laws”; finally, we proceeded to re-apply the “laws” to the familiar objects from which we had first extracted them, and the result was that we turned our previous notions of these inside out. For the typical intellectual position towards the end of the nineteenth century was exactly the reverse of the typical Academic position. Plato had deduced the sense-world from what we have called the inner world, and, while he had worked out an elaborate and wise knowledge of this inner world, with its moral impulses and aspirations, his philosophy had remained admittedly bankrupt as far as detailed knowledge of the mechanism of the outer world was concerned. Nineteenth-century science, on the other hand, deduced the inner from the outer; it had mapped and charted the mechanical part of Nature to a tenth of a millimetre,[61] but it was well-nigh bankrupt as far as the inner world was concerned. Huxley invented the word agnostic (not-knowing) to express his own attitude, and that of many millions since his day, to the nature and origin of all this part of the cosmos. One of the few things about which practically all “men of science”, as the phrase now went, besides all those laymen who took the trouble to follow out the various scientific discoveries and to listen to their metaphysical reverberations, were agreed upon was that his senses and his reason had succeeded in placing man in a material environment which appeared to bear no relation whatever to his inner feelings and moral impulses.

For the expression of these, his proper humanity, he continued, irrespective of his conscious belief, to live on what had been developed through Plato and the Gospels, the Church and the poets. For it was these, as we have seen, which had built up the meanings of those old words in terms of which he learnt to think and feel about his fellow-men. Whenever the biologico-mechanical meanings did creep into human relationships—as, for example, into the economic relationship through the word competition and otherwise—the result was, almost without exception, disastrous. The famous Encyclical Letter and Syllabus of 1864, in which modern movements of thought were condemned and anathematized wholesale from the Vatican, was thus in some sense an attempt to express in dogmatic form a principle which was, in fact, already active throughout Europe. And the pathetic impotence of this papal gesture probably marks the maximum point of that divergence between science and religion, as modes of experience, which first became noticeable in the Alexandrian world, and of which nineteenth-century philosophy had become sufficiently conscious to create the word Dualism.

The rapid conquest of intellectual Europe, which was achieved, not only by the general idea of evolution, but by the particular Darwinian theory of mechanical natural selection, is a matter of some surprise when we consider that a full acceptance of it necessitated a reversal of practically every metaphysical idea and feeling likely to be present in a nineteenth-century soul. No doubt one could point to a variety of causes. There is evidence, for instance, in a certain class of word which had recently begun to multiply that even in Protestant countries the custodians of the ancient outlook were not always fortresses of wisdom and enlightenment. Religionism appears towards the close of the eighteenth century, and then religiosity (in a bad sense),[62] and in the next century the now obsolete religiose. The word pious, which had long been degenerating towards an imputation of feeble-mindedness, formed an unpleasant derivative, pietism, which in turn produced its adjective pietistic; and in 1864—an appropriate year—we first come up against clericalism. Unction—the name of one of the deepest mysteries of the Catholic Church—is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary with an offensive meaning in 1870, when Lowell writes of “that clerical unction which in a vulgar nature so easily degenerates into greasiness”. Unctuous was not long in following suit, and instances could no doubt be multiplied. The extension towards the priesthood of this particular shade of disapproval seems to have been the product of the age. Possibly the single earlier example is the old word cant, which dates back to the Middle Ages, and is said to have been born of exasperation at the whining tone adopted by the mendicant friars in their “chants” (cantare). In the same way may we not suppose that the words quoted above grew up out of that extraordinary atmosphere of partly bovine, partly hypocritical, acquiescence in obsolete dogma which Stuart Mill hit off in his famous phrase[63]?

Nevertheless, we should have to look deeper than all this for the true causes of a change of outlook as rapid and emphatic as that which swept through the last century. If we did so, we should probably discern, as one of the most efficient, that vivid sense of orderliness and arrangement which had grown up during the eighteenth century, the reverence for Reason, and especially for Reason reflected[64] in the impartial laws which govern the working of Nature. To minds thus attuned direct intervention by the divine at any one point in the natural process could only seem like an intolerable liberty; and feeling as well as thought began to revolt at the conjuring-tricks apparently reported in the Gospels. Perhaps there is a faint indication of the new point of view in the nineteenth-century use of the word freak to describe a lusus naturae, instead of the old monster, which is derived from the Latin ‘moneo’, and implies that the oddity is sent as a divine warning or portent.

The new cosmos—a complex of matter and forces proceeding mechanically from spiral nebula to everlasting ice—took such a firm hold on the imagination of Europe that labels like spiritualism, spiritualist, spiritualistic[65] were employed to describe those who believed it was anything more, and even Vitalism and Vitalist to distinguish those who held that life, as such, had any purpose or significance. It is a curious remark that the erection within men’s imaginations of this severely mechanical framework for themselves was accompanied by, and may have been partly responsible for, an increase in their sense of self-consciousness. The more automatic the cosmos, apparently, the more the vital ego must needs feel itself detached. At any rate, we find upwards of forty words hyphened with self created in the nineteenth century, and of these only about six (self-acting, self-regulating, ...) are mechanical. Nor was it only the material world from which men felt themselves more aloof. Herbert Spencer remarked on the recent extension of the meaning of the word phenomenon to cover the thoughts of human beings—a point of view which suggests an increased degree of detachment even from thought itself; and an enormous number of words with terminations such as -ism, -ist, -ite, -ology, -arian, are indications of a more contemplative attitude to all that we ourselves do and feel and think. What a difference between being feminine and being a feminist, between hope and optimism, romance and romanticism, between Christianity and Christology, between liking vegetables and being a vegetarian! We are hardly conscious at all of being human, more of being humane, more still of being humanitarian, and very conscious indeed of being humanitarianists.

Detachment, however, spells freedom; and words are not wanting to remind us of that enhanced sense of the value of individual liberty which now found expression in the writings of the great Romantics and of men like John Stuart Mill. Autonomy had not been applied to individuals, but only to states and societies, until the close of the eighteenth century, and in the following century the adjective autonomous was introduced. We may compare liberalism and liberal-minded with the old libertine; authoritarian implies a feeling in him who uses the word that all authority, as such, is bad; the nineteenth century also saw the distinction between broad-minded and narrow-minded, and between obscurantism and enlightenment—a word which met with some opposition, according to FitzEdward Hall, who records in his Modern English (1873) that:

Since the sense of freedom often appeared at its strongest in imaginations which were most possessed with the mechanical view of the universe, the paradox was not infrequent—especially in Germany—of philosophers and scientists insisting fiercely on the freedom of thought and using it to deny the possibility of any freedom at all! Such thinkers found the word Determinism useful to express the mechanical part of the old predestination without the latter’s theological assumptions.

Other words which seem to be connected with the same trend of thought are those that confine themselves to expressing a sense of the worth and dignity of man, as man, and irrespective of his cosmic connections. Such are humanism,[66] humanitarian,[66] humanitarianism, individualism, individualist, individualistic, and many of the self words, such as Carlyle’s self-help, or the semantic change of self-respect, which is first recorded as used with a praiseworthy meaning in Wordsworth’s Prelude. Now the consciousness of the absolute value and infinite potentiality of each human soul is revealed, as we saw, by the words in which it first began to take verbal form, as having been essentially an attribute of Christianity. Yet how differently these nineteenth-century words sound from the Christian vocabulary of the human and social virtues—charity, lovingkindness, mercy, pity, and the like! The modern words seem to be related to these glowing old Christian terms as the unemphasized, because unquestioned, mutual affection of a happy couple is related to the voluble ardours of courting. They preserve, we may say—they have even greatly developed—that divine sense of the value and autonomy of each individual human soul. But it is now more of a political autonomy. It is as though they respected it rather from a manly sense of obligation, and the sense of obligation is even extended, as we see in the later semantic development of humane, humanity, and humanitarian, to the brutes.

Thus, if the one outlook is indeed a lineal descendant of the other, we are constrained to ask a little sadly what had become of a certain sunny element, a suppressed poetic energy, a wonder and a wild surprise, which lurks in the former words, but somehow—with all our respect for them—not in the latter. And for light upon this question we must turn to yet another group of words—small, yet of such far-reaching implications as to demand a final chapter to themselves.