Machine

The Arts, industrial and æsthetic, furnish illustrations perhaps still more striking. Flint implements of the kind recently found in certain of the later geologic deposits—implements so rude that some have held them to be of natural rather than of artificial origin—show the extreme want of precision in men’s first handyworks. Though a great advance on these is seen in the tools and weapons of existing savage tribes, yet an inexactness in forms and fittings, more than anything else distinguishes such tools and weapons from those of civilized races. In a less degree, the productions of semi-barbarous nations are characterized by like defects. A Chinese junk with all its contained furniture and appliances, nowhere presents a perfectly straight line, a uniform curve, or a true surface. Nor do the utensils and machines of our ancestors fail to exhibit a similar inferiority to our own. An antique chair, an old fireplace, a lock of the last century, or almost any article of household use that has been preserved for a few generations, will prove by contrast how greatly the industrial products of our time excel those of the past in their accuracy.

Since planing machines have been invented, it has become possible to produce absolutely straight lines, and surfaces so truly level as to be air-tight when applied to each other. While in the dividing-engine of Troughton, in the micrometer of Whitworth, and in microscopes that show fifty thousand divisions to the inch, we have an exactness as far exceeding that reached in the works of our great-grandfathers, as theirs exceeded that of the aboriginal celt-makers. In the Fine Arts there has been a parallel process. From the rudely carved and painted idols of savages, through the early sculptures characterized by limbs having no muscular detail, wooden-looking drapery, and faces devoid of individuality, up to the later statues of the Greeks or some of those now produced, the increased accuracy of representation is conspicuous. Compare the mural paintings of the Egyptians with the paintings of medieval Europe, or these with modern paintings, and the more precise rendering of the appearances of objects is manifest. So too is it with the delineations of fiction and the drama.

Nor do the industrial and æsthetic Arts fail to supply us with equally conclusive evidence. The progress from rude, small, and simple tools, to perfect, complex, and large machines, illustrates not only a progress in heterogeneity and in definiteness, but also in integration. Among what are classed as the mechanical powers, the advance from the lever to the wheel-and-axle is an advance from a simple agent to an agent made up of several simple ones combined together. On comparing the wheel-and-axle, or any of the machines used in early times with those used now, we find an essential difference to be, that in each of our machines several of the primitive machines are united into one. A modern apparatus for spinning or weaving, for making stockings or lace, contains not simply a lever, an inclined plane, a screw, a wheel-and-axle, united together; but several of each integrated into one complex whole. Again, in early ages, when horse-power and man-power were alone employed, the motive agent was not bound up with the tool moved; but the two have now become in many cases fused together: the fire-box and boiler of a locomotive are combined with the machinery which the steam works.

Nor is this the most extreme case. A still more extensive integration is exhibited in every large factory. Here we find a large number of complicated machines, all connected by driving shafts with the same steam-engine—all united with it into one vast apparatus. Contrast the mural decorations of the Egyptians and Assyrians with modern historical paintings, and there becomes manifest a great advance in unity of composition—in the subordination of the parts to the whole. One of these ancient frescoes is in truth made up of a number of pictures that have little mutual dependence. The several figures of which each group consists, show very imperfectly by their attitudes, and not at all by their expressions, the relations in which they stand to each other; the respective groups might be separated with but little loss of meaning; and the centre of chief interest, which should link all parts together, is often inconspicuous. The same trait may be noted in the tapestries of medieval days. Representing perhaps a hunting scene, one of these exhibits men, horses, dogs, beasts, birds, trees, and flowers, miscellaneously dispersed: the living objects being variously occupied, and mostly with no apparent consciousness of each other’s proximity.

Of the physical forces that are directly transformed into social ones, the like is to be said. Currents of air and water, which before the use of steam were the only agencies brought in aid of muscular effort for the performance of industrial processes, are, as we have seen, generated by the heat of the sun. And the inanimate power that now, to so vast an extent, supplements human labour, is similarly derived. The late George Stephenson was one of the first to recognize the fact that the force impelling his locomotive, originally emanated from the sun. Step by step we go back—from the motion of the piston to the evaporation of the water; thence to the heat evolved during the oxidation of coal; thence to the assimilation of carbon by the plants of whose imbedded remains coal consists; thence to the carbonic acid from which their carbon was obtained; and thence to the rays of light that de-oxidized this carbonic acid. Solar forces millions of years ago expended on the Earth’s vegetation, and since locked up beneath its surface, now smelt the metals required for our machines, turn the lathes by which the machines are shaped, work them when put together, and distribute the fabrics they produce. And in so far as economy of labour makes possible the support of a larger population; gives a surplus of human power that would else be absorbed in manual occupations; and so facilitates the development of higher kinds of activity; it is clear that these social forces which are directly correlated with physical forces anciently derived from the sun, are only less important than those whose correlates are the vital forces recently derived from it.

Analogous phenomena may be observed where the water is stationary and the solid matter moving. A stick drawn laterally through the water with much force, proves by the throb which it communicates to the hand that it is in a state of vibration. Even where the moving body is massive, it only requires that great force should be applied to get a sensible effect of like kind: instance the screw of a screw-steamer, which instead of a smooth rotation falls into a rapid rhythm that sends a tremor through the whole vessel. The sound which results when a bow is drawn over a violin-string, shows us vibrations produced by the movement of a solid over a solid. In lathes and planing machines, the attempt to take off a thick shaving causes a violent jar of the whole apparatus, and the production of a series of waves on the iron or wood that is cut. Every boy in scraping his slate-pencil finds it scarcely possible to help making a ridged surface. If you roll a ball along the ground or over the ice, there is always more or less up and down movement—a movement that is visible while the velocity is considerable, but becomes too small and rapid to be seen by the unaided eye as the velocity diminishes.

Cette idée, émise en biologie depuis longtemps par de grands physiologistes, paraît de plus en plus vraie à mesure que la science de l'organisation des êtres vivants fait plus de progrès. Ce qu'il faut savoir en outre, c'est que ces particules intimes de l'organisme ne manifestent leur activité vitale que par une relation physico-chimique nécessaire avec des milieux intimes que nous devons également étudier et connaître. Autrement, si nous nous bornons à l'examen des phénomènes d'ensemble visibles à l'extérieur, nous pourrons croire faussement qu'il y a dans l'être vivant une force propre qui viole les lois physico-chimiques du milieu cosmique général, de même qu'un ignorant pourrait croire que, dans une machine qui monte dans les airs ou qui court sur la terre, il y a une force spéciale qui viole les lois de la gravitation. Or l'organisme vivant n'est qu'une machine admirable douée des propriétés les plus merveilleuses et mise en activité à l'aide des mécanismes les plus complexes et les plus délicats. Il n'y a pas des forces en opposition et en lutte les unes avec les autres; dans la nature il ne saurait y avoir qu'arrangement et dérangement, qu'harmonie et désharmonie.

Les machines vivantes sont donc créés et construites de telle façon, qu'en se perfectionnant, elles deviennent de plus en plus libres dans le milieu cosmique général. Mais il n'en existe pas moins toujours le déterminisme le plus absolu dans leur milieu interne, qui, par suite de ce même perfectionnement organique s'est isolé de plus en plus du milieu cosmique extérieur. La machine vivante entretient son mouvement parce que le mécanisme interne de l'organisme répare, par des actions et par des forces sans cesse renaissantes, les pertes qu'entraîne l'exercice des fonctions. Les machines que l'intelligence de l'homme crée, quoique infiniment plus grossières, ne sont pas autrement construites. Une machine à vapeur possède une activité indépendante des conditions physico-chimiques extérieures puisque par le froid, le chaud, le sec et l'humide, la machine continue à fonctionner. Mais pour le physicien qui descend dans le milieu intérieur de la machine, il trouve que cette indépendance n'est qu'apparente, et que le mouvement de chaque rouage intérieur est déterminé par des conditions physiques absolues, et dont il connaît la loi. De même pour le physiologiste, s'il peut descendre dans le milieu intérieur de la machine vivante, il y trouve un déterminisme absolu qui doit devenir pour lui la base réelle de la science des corps vivants.

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ARE WE AUTOMATA? First published in Mind, 4, 1-22. Everyone is now acquainted with the Conscious-Automaton-theory to which Prof. Huxley[1] gave such publicity in his Belfast address; which the late Mr. D. A. Spalding punctiliously made the pivot of all his book-notices in Nature; which Prof. Clifford fulminated as a dogma essential to salvation in a lecture on "Body and Mind"[2] but which found its earliest and ablest exposition in Mr. Hodgson's magnificent work, The Theory of Practice.[3] The theory maintains that in everything outward we are pure material machines. Feeling is a mere collateral product of our nervous processes, unable to react upon them any more than a shadow reacts on the steps of the traveller whom it accompanies. Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the voyage of life, it is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch the helm or handle the rigging.