Machine People

I

Man’s Fear of Machines Is Dread of Himself

THE spirit of man is in his machines. He sees it and is afraid. So also his spirit was in pyramids and temples. Yet these evoke simple feelings of awe and admiration whereas the machine inspires a sentiment of dread. Where lies that difference?

The wonder of a pyramid is monumental. The wonder of a temple is beauty. But the wonder of machine is function. There is the difference.

The machine is the will of man engined. It is the free extension of himself in a new dimension and that is the dimension of force.

Having as out of a dream raised up this force, the spirit of him externalized, and seeing how for good or evil it may be multiplied by itself without end, the conjurer has moments of terror. It is not the machine he fears, though he says it is.

First and last he has believed in many jealous gods, all inhabitants of this dimension. He has not yet met one of them face to face, but as he stands on the rim of knowledge, where light ends, groping for more elemental facts, and remembers that he knows only how force acts and nothing at all about what it is—then, well, nothing that might happen would greatly surprise him. There is that.

But much more it is that he fears his own nature. The history of the human spirit is that often it sees the better way and takes the worse. As the spirit is so must the machine be. Demon spirit, demon machine. Thus there will be good and evil machines and some good and some evil in any of them. The machine itself is not terrifying. What possesses it may be. This is man afraid of himself.

Fear moves the whole theme against science. Any one of its many variations may be so referred back. And that few are entirely free of it may be inferred from the fact that protagonists of science themselves contribute to the fear theme, as in the following expression, which is representative:

“Already the applications of science to human affairs have far outrun the ability of man to use them wisely. The engineer has provided agencies of incalculable value in time of peace, but they are also endowed with prodigious powers of destruction which can be loosed in time of war. Unless we solve the problems encountered in man himself the outlook is dark, indeed, and it may even be questioned whether our civilization will endure.”

This was said recently in an atmosphere of science by one of a board of trustees named by the National Academy of Sciences to collect and administer a national fund for the support of research in pure science. The speaker subscribed to the thought that “science carries within it not only the seeds of its own destruction but the seeds of its own salvation.” Therefore, he said he was optimistic; he proposed toward salvation more knowledge, especially scientific knowledge of human behaviour. His optimism, contemplating a social organism with million-minded knowledge and power, appears to rest on the assumption that knowledge increases wisdom. Yet the problem, as he himself stated it, was that knowledge had outrun wisdom.

Every other variety of the theme is pessimistic. Religion, advancing the claims of faith against reason, complains of scientism that it absorbs man’s idea of God and leaves him spiritually desolate. It takes away his beautiful myths, the inner truth of them along with the tale; it has made him to regard himself as an ascending beast, responsible to his wayward will; it has delivered him in bondage to his senses and reason, with all of life that proceeds from the heart left out and no way to satisfy the transcendental cravings of the spirit.

Among ardent religionists and modern mystics are those who propose a science holiday for so long as may be necessary to restore the lost prestige of the soul. Some would make it forever, wishing for mankind a return to the middle ages when faith and reason were reconciled in one body of knowledge and human thought reached to heaven. Yet even these will speak of a science of religion, a science of morals, a science of ethics; and their science holiday would turn out to be a selective suppression. They would doubtless wish to keep alive the sciences that pertain to hygiene and medicine and perhaps as much of the science of biology as could be limited to plant and animal life. They would admit astronomy and orthodox philosophy as belonging to the tradition of classical learning. Mathematics, that once had equal rights in that estate, would have first to be purified because it has latterly been a powerful tool in the hands of the profane. Zones free and forbidden would be necessary in chemistry, a little of which is needful to medicine. This of course leads to hopeless confusion.

It is not science they are talking about. Only certain effects of science are deemed sinister, or such new knowledge as tends to increase man’s ecstasy of self-extension in power on earth.

The foreboding of the scientist is that with too much knowledge man may be tempted to destroy his civilization. What will save him is wisdom. Religion’s foreboding is that with too much knowledge he will destroy his soul. What can save him is faith.

It is true that knowledge will alter man’s ways of thinking about nature and God. That has nothing whatever to do with his religious feeling, which, though it may be intellectualized, has not its source in the intellect and is probably, as a scientific fact, an instinct. Great scientists have been believers and non-believers, always in the individual case for a reason that could not be given. Faraday who captured and delivered to inventive mankind the force of electro-magnetism, belonged to a small sect that hired no preachers; and if the world where his fame was had wanted to find him on Sunday it would have had to look for him in the pulpit of a little church in some unheard-of village, preaching a sermon on the soul.

Steinmetz, a recent worker in the field opened by Faraday, once drew a map to represent the idea of sequence in the wave phenomena of cosmic energy and so divided it into octaves that it suggested the key board of an organ. Other scientists, seeing it, wished copies of it, and so it got scattered around.

A man at the top of a great private research laboratory accidentally turns up his copy in the way of looking for something else and thinks you may be interested. Beneath the chart is a typed text, pasted on.

“Did Steinmetz write this?”

“No,” he says. “I did that.”

This is the pasted-on text:

The Keyboard of God’s Organ.

(Over sixty octaves.)

The flash of lightning,

The roll of thunder,

The wonder worker, electricity,

The far-flung wireless waves,

The searcher for truth, light,

The conserver of life, heat,

The X-rays, with their gift for divining the unseen—

Are stops under the control of the master organist.

Never out of tune,

Perfect harmony,

No interference,

No friction,

The energy of the universe.

Why doubt God’s existence.

II

All Wheels Do Run by Faith

Some heavenly creatures once came calling on Ezekiel in a vision. Each one of them had four faces—cherub, lion, ox and eagle—and they were in other details wonderful; but Ezekiel particularly noticed their celestial motor vehicle. The rims of its wheels were high and dreadful, set with eyes, and: “The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of a beryl, and they four had one likeness; and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went they went upon their four sides, and they turned not when they went.”

He concluded that the spirit of the creatures was in the wheels.

You would hardly expect a prophet to seize at a glance the physical principle of a four-sided wheel that seemed to go on its four sides without turning. That principle may yet be discovered. If this ever happens we shall call it science. But with that kind of wheel in his hands, though he were moving the traffic of the world by means of it, still would the true scientist admit rationally what is stated emotionally in the negro spiritual:

Ezekiel saw the wheel

Way up in the middle of the air.

Little wheel run by faith,

Big wheel run by the grace of God,

Way up in the middle of the air.

Here, besides the rare aesthetic perception to make poetical use of a mechanical image, is a profound truth. Every wheel we have is a wheel within a wheel. Every wheel that runs does run by faith, though you take it to be only the faith implicit among us that the big cosmic wheel will run true and not fail. And what makes the big wheel run at all nobody knows.

Do you know what happens when you turn the switch to light the house or cook the food or start the electric motor? At the power station they know many more facts about it than you know. In the laboratory they have some scientific theories about it. But at last, really, no one knows any more about this force of electro-magnetism now touching our every-day existence at every point than you know yourself when you turn the switch. You know what will happen. You know what that force will do. You do not know what it is, nor does anyone else know.

Certainly no one would hold that science is more unreligious than art, especially modern art. Yet art supports the case of religion against science. This it does on aesthetic ground. The machine is making the world ugly. Machine civilization with its standards and methods of mass production is sunk in idolatry of a fabulous materialism, power, wealth, success. Where is culture in this vulgar scheme? Where is nature?

But what art fears is that its own world of remembered images, ideas and relations will be swallowed up; and it cannot imagine how to create another that will contain this new reality. The world of machine civilization is set with strange forms. These are not symbols. They are direct facts, un-haunted by human experience. They have no analogies, no associations, no past. They exist for the first time originally in the present; therefore they recall nothing. That is why they are not symbols. Their meaning is not in them; it is outside of them, in their functions. There is no art tradition of how these machine forms may be seized by the aesthetic sense and made into art forms, nor of how people may be related to them in feeling.

Ruth gleaning in the fields of Boaz stands in a simple three-fold relation to the universe, to the earth, to her man. She may be perceived aesthetically. Art can tell her something she would not otherwise know about herself.

Ruth in three ounces of rayon minding a machine for capital—how may she be perceived?

That was life and art included it. This is life and art excludes it. Man interrogating the serpent is art material; man interrogating the atomic table is not. Art has nothing to tell him about himself. It does not see him aesthetically, which is the only way of seeing that can justify art; and therefore it is probable that he will not see art. Nevertheless he will see many wonders.

Philosophy, too, has a case against scientism. This is high altitude. Philosophy once contained physical science and then set it off as a satellite. Now the moon behaves in the manner of a planet, expecting other bodies to revolve around it.

Between philosophy and science, nevertheless, is a working relation that cannot be broken. When science cannot get any further with facts alone and is blocked for want of new ideas it takes its facts to philosophy asking for another hypothesis to fit them. Philosophy proposes a new hypothesis. It may or not be true, but science, returning with it to the field of experiment, says, “Let’s behave as if it were true and see what will happen. At least we may be able to knock down some new facts.” That is generally what happens. True or false, the hypothesis is a weapon for prizing new facts out of the unknown. Facts are required to prove it either true or false. The facts that prove it to be untrue may be strange enough to suggest a new hypothesis, and so the procedure is.

All of this, says philosophy, is quite right. That is as the relation should be. But when science becomes impatient with the rate of progress in the region of pure thought, where the hypothesis should come from, and enters it to find one on its own account, it very often forgets what it came for and ends by inventing a whole new system of thought, generalized from physical facts; and that is not its right business at all.

It is the affair of science, says philosophy, to explore the cause of phenomena, whereas it is the affair of philosophy to consider the cause of cause. It is not for science to comprehend philosophy, since philosophy comprehends everything—the whole, that is to say—and of the whole, science for all its luminosity is merely one part. Philosophy comprehends also religion, art, ethics, first cause, the purpose of life and the meaning of meaning. Science, not knowing its own limitations, is likely to betray man with the delusion that an account of the universe in physical terms is an account of everything in it, including himself. That is a disaster philosophy dreads.

Here is dangerous walking for the common lay person. He shall watch his step. Yet he may trust himself to recognize feeling in any language, and it is with feeling that philosophy argues the matter. For this purpose it takes anything it likes from religion, art or ethics, as it rightly may do, since it comprehends them; and then as it comprehends science also it is in a position to scold science out of its own text. It remembers many things about science that science itself would just as soon forget. There was a great scientist who reduced the universe to a mechanism, and said: “In this system there is no need of a God.” He was right unawares. There was no need of a God in his mechanism for the reason, as it turned out, that there was no such mechanism. It would work mathematically, but not in any other way. Facts destroyed it. Mathematics is the scientific mind’s tool of precision. Yet more than once with that tool speculative science has proved the existence of a non-existent universe.

Philosophy accuses science moreover of idolatry and confusion. It has been heard worshipping a god named ether that had promised to explain all the mysteries of the physical world. This god was invisible; his existence could not be proved. But science said his existence was not at all important as a fact, only as an idea, and it proposed to behave as if the idea were true. Proposing, therefore, to found a physical doctrine on a metaphysical assumption. At another time science has seriously considered matter to be nothing but a series of holes in an imaginary medium. First it tries to explain the unknown by the known; then it proposes to explain the known by the unknown.

There is a rational solution that occurs even to the stupidity of the lay person. The world is too complicated. That seems to be the trouble. So why not take it that Berkeley and Hobbes were right. One reasoned away matter; the other reasoned away mind. In that case there is neither mind nor matter, neither materiality nor immateriality. There is nothing left to explain. Nothing exists. Then science perhaps could make a world fit for human understanding.

Now science, injured in its feelings, will be heard from in its own case. In the first place, if it were stupid it would not have this immense authority to be challenged. There is a certain structure. At the top is speculative science. There the mind is intellectually naïve, purposefully. It will take anything to be true, or one and the same thing to be both true and untrue or neither true nor untrue. This is the mind that may say: “We know by our senses that the world is round. But let us suppose it is flat and look at it that way.” It is perhaps unfortunate that what happens in this region of thought becomes audible. No matter. From a beam of light passing for the thousand and first time through a prism, from the chance contact of two pieces of substance, or from one instant of irrational curiosity, may come a fact that will open suddenly a whole vista of strange knowledge.

This is discovery, and there is no technic of it. Galileo in a cathedral, gazing at the swinging lamps, perhaps because he was bored, discovered the law of the pendulum. This was of no practical use whatever. Merely a fact. Then someone invented a clock, all but one troublesome detail. How could the revolutions of its wheels be regulated? Ah, the pendulum!

Many years ago a physicist named La Grange might have been seen in his laboratory playing with a stretched string that had been loaded with tiny weights at equal intervals. He would have said he was trying to make a mathematical analysis of the behaviour of mechanically vibrating bodies. He noted certain facts of phenomena, gave them large names and reduced them to a generalization that had no relation whatever to anything real that people then had ever imagined wanting. Later the telephone was invented. People did want that; and having found how convenient it was in the neighborhood they wished to extend it over wide areas. Then the problem of how to transmit electrical vibrations long distances over a tiny wire. In the search for a solution of this problem La Grange’s work was remembered. In view of analogies discovered since his time between the behaviour of mechanically and electrically vibrating bodies, what did those little weights on his string suggest? A device now called the loading coil. Without loading coils at equal intervals along a telephone wire, behaving as the little weights behaved on La Grange’s string, long distance telephony would be practically impossible.

III

Exploring the Absolute Sea

The pure scientist, fishing in the absolute sea, is not an inventor. In the field of invention is the practical science worker with a problem given. Something is wanted, like a machine to tell time. He may have it all but the pendulum. If the law of the pendulum has not been discovered he is stuck. It sometimes happens that he will then go fishing himself beyond the rim of knowledge with miraculous luck. Nevertheless, discovery for its own sake, above the plane of invention, has the use of increasing the stock and variety of pure fact-knowledge, which is to increase the probability that the particular fact the inventor needs to solve his problem will exist when he wants it, like the law of the pendulum.

The modern idea of true scientific method is that new facts and the theories that correlate them shall continually descend into the hands of the practical science workers who make the crude, experimental models. It is on their benches you see the wonder of idea in the anguish of trial reality, spirit commanding matter and endowing it with form, purpose and function. The work of these is handed down to the field of technology, where the technician, the engineer and at last the mechanic bring the economic reality to pass.

The whole sequence lies in the history of the dynamo. An Italian scientist named Galvani in 1792 happened to get a piece of iron and a piece of copper into the leg of a dead frog, both at the same time. The leg jerked. Thereupon he announced excitedly to the scientific world that he had discovered the source of electricity in a frog’s leg. Another scientist named Volta said that was ridiculous; it couldn’t be in the frog’s leg; it must be in the conjunction of frog’s leg, iron and copper.

From this controversy came the true discovery that two metals immersed in acid produce an electric current. There, then, was the battery, which at once became the wonder toy of every scientific laboratory. Quite by accident it was discovered next that a wire charged with current from a battery had power to magnetize a near-by piece of iron. This meant that something jumped from the charged wire into the dead iron.

Thus scientific electrical knowledge stood until one day it occurred to Faraday to say, “If something jumps from a charged wire into a piece of iron to magnetize it, why won’t something jump from a piece of magnetized iron into an uncharged wire?” He made a coil of wire and attached the ends of it to a galvanometer, which was an instrument Galvani had invented to register electric current. The purpose of the galvanometer was to show if anything jumped from the magnetized piece of iron into the wire. Then he stuck the magnet inside the coil and looked at the galvanometer. Nothing was jumping. “No good,” he said; but as he took the magnet away he happened to notice that the galvanometer needle moved slightly. So he put the magnet inside the coil again. As it was going in the galvanometer needle moved, then stood still again. “So!” said Faraday, “Maybe the magnet wants to be wiggled.” He wiggled it and as he did the galvanometer needle moved; if he stopped wiggling it the galvanometer needle stopped. This proved that something did jump from a magnetized piece of iron into a coil of wire, provided the iron magnet was kept moving.

Well, there is the complete principle of the dynamo. That is all a dynamo is—a revolving magnet within a coil of wire. Yet Faraday, having made this discovery, did not invent a dynamo. He was not an inventor to begin with, and, besides, before anybody could work with his facts they had to be formulated. A mathematician did that. Years elapsed before there was any practical application of the formulated scientific facts to the everyday work of mankind. It was necessary for someone to have the idea that to be able to carry power further from its source than the reach of a shaft or a belt would be a great convenience; and it was necessary for that idea of a thing wanted to connect with the idea of means. At last the thought came. If it was true that electric current was energy, and true that you could produce it by revolving a piece of magnetized iron inside a coil of wire, then why couldn’t that energy be led away by wire from where it was produced to any distant point at which you wished to use it?

Thus was added the economic link to complete a chain of events by which now all the electric power in the world may be traced back to the jerk of a dead frog’s leg under the eye of naïve scientific curiosity.

All of this is science in its own case. And if it were a body with a mechanism where the feelings ought to be it might rest its case on the evidence and say no more. But it belongs to life; therefore it is controversial and has a spirit of retort. Reason can no more let faith lie than faith can let reason lie.

Science boasts of having delivered man from darkness and superstition. Only ten generations ago faith burned a man for saying the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo, who founded experimental science with a thud by dropping two bodies of unequal weight from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa to prove that the sacred Aristotle had blundered—he was imprisoned in his old age, not precisely for that impious act but because, besides, he held with Bruno that the sun was the center of the universe; and although he recanted, still he was imprisoned lest he should say it again. Even long after this the pioneers of modern science wrote down their discoveries in cypher, backward, upside down and mirror-wise, fearing the fate of heretics. Some of these writings, notably those of Leonardo de Vinci, perhaps the most gifted experimental scientist since Archimedes, are not wholly deciphered to this day. The literature of science current—the latest book or notable speech—will still recite the roll of martyrs.

Then there are those, not themselves scientists, who lisp the language of science with literary skill and say such stupid things as that philosophy is the pursuit of infantile minds and cannot survive the facts. This makes only a sense of scandal. What is a fact? The simplest fact, if pursued, leads science to what it calls an explanatory crisis, as every scientist will admit.

That science has moods of intolerance and sometimes forgets the distinction between dogma and hypothesis is merely a weakness that keeps it kin. But of all its reactions the one most human is to the taunt that in this scientific age human progress, if it may be called progress, is forward, not upward. To this science answers it is not a scientific age. Witness Dayton, Tennessee, or the fact that in thirteen states people have tried to pass laws forbidding the evolution of man to be taught in public schools over the myth of special creation.

As it regards the material universe the scientific mind conceives order—complete, perfect and sublime order—and is moved thereby to awe and reverence, often to a state of deep religious feeling, with or without a specific God image. Then it turns to regard human society and conceives it to be a bedlam, a muddle, torn by disharmonies and uproar. And this it accounts for, saying the material universe is the work of nature and therefore scientific; but man made society, and society is artificial and unscientific.

As to the conclusion, it is probably wrong. Society and everything belonging to it must have existed from the beginning as a potential within nature. Society, therefore, is a natural thing. If not—if society is an artificiality and a disorder—then nature contained the potentiality of artificiality and disorder, wherefore her own order is not perfect. But in any case, here are certain interesting implications. Does the theory of evolution hold for the species man only up to the point at which he became a social animal and began to make society? If so, the law of evolution is not absolute, since it breaks; if not, and the law of evolution holds for society, how is it that a law of nature has produced a result, namely society, which the scientific mind calls unscientific?

IV

No Way to Go Back

If at this point the question were moved it would be: Shall man go back to an age of faith that he remembers or shall he move on through doubt and uproar, pursuing the idea of a scientific commonwealth?

The mystic who says back has the advantage of being positive. Science says forward in knowledge and all will be well, provided the problem of man himself can be solved.

It seems a terrible dilemma; nevertheless it is supposed that man has this choice to make. The scientific mind supposes it. In a brilliant little book entitled “Daedalus, or Science and the Future,” J. B. S. Haldane, of Cambridge University, stops to consider whether the pursuit of scientific knowledge is likely to be abandoned. “It is after all,” he says, “a very recent form of human activity and a sufficiently universal protest of mankind would be able to arrest it even now.”

He may have been thinking back to Archimedes who, on discovering the law of the lever, exulted: “Give me whereon to stand and I will move the earth.” Many years before Christ the Greeks and Alexandrians imagined cog wheels, pinions, pulleys, steam power, pumps, pneumatic and hydraulic machines, and had enough sound knowledge of the physical and mechanical sciences among them to have begun at that time the true scientific age.

What they lacked was the economic motive. The Romans who succeeded them had no feeling for science; they had only military and political instinct. After the rule of Romans came the rule of faith. Man moved his whole treasure to heaven; and forbade himself on pain of torture and death to rediscover what the Greeks knew two thousand years before.

The possibility that this history may be repeated is a theatrical thought. The imagination delights to play with it. However, a crucial fact of difference is left out. Probably because it had no economic motive behind it, or for want of time, or for any reason that may be, the fact is that Greek science did not enter the scheme of life. They got no further with it than theory, description and model. Though the whole of it were lost or forgotten life would go on as before and on the same scale as before. But if this knowledge had been used to multiply the means of life—steam power for engines, industrial machines and transportation instead of turning toys and swinging temple doors with it—then people had been no more likely to lose or forget it than to lose the rude art of agriculture by which they lived. Population would have increased enormously, the phenomena of industrial empire would have appeared in the Mediterranean part of the world more than twenty centuries ago, and all modern history would be very different.

There was never any absolute necessity for the machine. Life could exist without it, only, of course on a much smaller tapestry. It is use creates the necessity for the machine. The scientific use of physical and mechanical knowledge to increase both the agricultural and the industrial means of life has made it possible in our time to sustain on the earth a population that could not otherwise exist, that would otherwise have perished before it was born. This is a fact we keep forgetting. It is the fact that relates human life to science in a vital sense.

There is no way to go back.

A wish to live again in the past is very old. The future is unknown, the present is turmoil, but the past may be anything we like to think it was—a fine old ruin in romantic perspective, perfected by the imagination, and we live in it as in our dreams. Man has always had in him the myth of a golden age, a time to go back to, a yearning for return. All of this revolt against science, this fear of the machine, this notion that knowledge may be leading civilization to an abyss, may be and probably is referable to that ancient, infantile myth surviving unawares in the modern mentality.

No rational being would exchange the whole of the present for the whole of the past, only parts of one for the other. Well, that is impossible. Nor can any troublesome part of the present be got rid of by the alternative, sometimes suggested, of standing still. The science holiday again.

It is no more possible to stop than it is to go back. Why this is true is not so easily stated. A principle of acceleration acts. We know it and feel it, our everyday calculations include it, and yet it is difficult to say what it is. Progress, though it were progress forward only and not upward, must be at an accelerating rate. Knowledge increases in that manner; so does wanting.

Epochs and ages we speak of in a way to make believe we understand them. We know much more about the present than about any past age or epoch, and yet how little we understand the present!

A way to see his own works and interpret them to himself is one of man’s great needs and he is not sufficiently aware of it. When he is he will find the instruments. What they will be like we do not know, any more than it was known beforehand what the telescope or microscope would be like.

One of the classics of science is the story of Herschel, a musician whose interest in the heavens led him to become an astronomer. He had first to master mathematics. Then, as he could not afford to buy a telescope, he resolved to make one; and for this purpose he had to master the science of optics and the technology of instrument making. From a musical performance he would rush back to his lodgings to resume the labor of grinding and polishing reflecting mirrors by hand. After hundreds of failures he produced a telescope equal to any in the world and discovered the planet Uranus.

Such zeal is common among workers in the tradition of science. Ways therefore have been found to search the remoteness of the heavens to discover the past of many things, to apprehend the unknown and to see the invisible, each way with its method or science.

But where is any science of the present? We know more about the movements of astronomical bodies than about the play of everyday economic forces. There is a way whereby man may contemplate his own thoughts and yet no proper or deeply considered way whereby he may contemplate his own works and refer their significance to his understanding. Philosophical contemplation of the universe as a mechanism is a grand activity of the mind; the machine that has appeared suddenly in the earth is an object of momentous meaning, and the philosophical mind is loath to perceive it; the aesthetic mind will not.

V

The Incorruptible Image of Truth

The machine will reward contemplation. Try it. Any machine will do—the small gasolene engine on one’s own premises. There is much to be learned from bringing the mind to dwell upon it.

The history of the human mind is there. Circles, true angles and the revolving wheel first presented themselves to the intuition of man as symbols of mystery and supernatural power. That is to say, they were seized by acts of religious and aesthetic perception. Reality has also that way of disclosing itself long before the facts are found out. Many years before it could be proved scientifically at all the Greeks deduced the sphericity of the earth from their aesthetic sense. The sphere was the ideal form of a solid; therefore the earth was round.

The science of experimental mechanics, raising such forms as the circle, the angle and the wheel to the power of function, was an achievement of the reason, working practically.

Invisible in the machine are physical laws. Man did not invent these laws. They are inherent in the universe. But he had to discover the facts and then formulate them as laws, and this was the work of the speculative faculty, working in abstraction.

How strange that the machine you are looking at, acting by what is proved and proving that by which it acts, should be a form of truth the signs of which first appeared in superstitious rites of magic and had then to be pursued through millenniums of error. Even this may not yet be its whole reality. Very likely not. What perversity is error! Always the wrong way first and the right way last. In every case the right way, once we find it, is so direct and obvious that to have missed it seems the strangest fact of all.

So there many be many ways of arriving at truth. To the reality now acting in machine forms, religion, art, philosophy and science have all contributed by moving knowledge one step at a time, with no sense of direction, no goal in sight, and yet steadily hitherward. The spectacle of the human mind exerting itself blindly, erringly, victoriously, to bring about a condition it cannot foresee is utterly mysterious to the reason.

And why suppose there is or ever will be a period to that mystery? For all the knowledge we think we have, a child gazing at the machine may ask questions that will bring us at once to the end of it. Take them to be physical questions. What happens inside the cylinder of the engine? A gas mixture—air and gasolene—is first compressed, then receives a spark and explodes, driving the piston downward. But why does it sometimes knock? That question exhausts our knowledge.

Searching for the answer a physicist in the Bureau of Standards at Washington may be found at the beautiful play of exploding gases in a soap bubble. If you ask him what he is doing he will say he is making thermodynamic studies of gaseous explosive reactions. That means he wants to know the answer to the child’s question. Why does the gasolene engine sometimes knock?

In the research laboratory of a great automobile corporation the approach is from a different angle. The reason for the knock is in the fuel, namely, gasolene. Well then, what is gasolene? They break gasolene down to its parts, burn each part separately, and know what that stuff is. Then they spread out before them the atomic table and begin to search for an organic compound which added to gasolene will produce a more favorable happening in the engine cylinder. They have no idea what it will be; they know only what they want it to do, and there is no certainty that it exists. Now, the number of organic compounds that may be constructed from the atomic table, given an inch of type each for description, would fill millions of books. For all practical purposes the number is infinite. Therefore when you go looking for a certain compound, character unknown that must do a certain thing, you are looking for one grain of sand on the ocean beach. It is impossible to search the beach one grain at a time. You can only pick up a grain here and another there and examine it hopefully. So they explore the atomic table, trying this compound and then that one, and after four years they are discouraged. They have found compounds that are better than gasolene and compounds that are worse, and each one is marked on the table. So there is a point here and another there and one away up near the top, hundreds of them, in fact, but there is no drift to follow and they are sick of just fumbling around. Then one man with nothing else to do sticks pegs into those points on the flat atomic map—an inch peg for gasolene, a half-inch peg for a compound half as good as gasolene, a longer peg for one a little better, and so on. Still he discerns nothing. But the boss scientist happens to see this peg field at a certain angle of vision and says: “I think I see a warp across the tops of those pegs. Look. Don’t you see they tend slightly to grow taller in that direction to the upper left?” The others look as he is looking. They see it too. There is a warp in this third dimension and it gives them for the first time a sense of direction. Following the warp they come to something nobody had ever thought of—a lead compound which, added to gasolene, does create a more favorable happening in the engine cylinder.

The knock is the machine’s own protest against error. The evil in itself is not serious. But the sound is one we hate to hear. Sound of error. This is significant. We should probably find by going deep enough for it that man’s passion to perfect the machine, even the sound of it, though the upper motive is rational or economic, is really from the essence of his nature. It is as if he were proving something to himself. What science continually and rationally seeks is the constant. What the restless spirit seeks is certitude. Belief in human perfectibility is a faith of which the evidence is weak and conflicting. But in the machine man finds the principle of perfectibility. To increase its precision, sweeten its rhythm and raise its power to any sign, he has only to discover the true laws of its being and bring them into a relation of harmony. Then logic is implicit in its behaviour.

VI

Its Effect Upon Our Minds and Behavior

It may be the spirit will not change, but from perfecting, minding and living with machines the mentality will. Certainly a machine environment will induce new habits of thinking. To act upon a machine with passion, malice or impulsive ignorance is to wreck it, and the lesson is final. To command its power you are obliged to act upon it with knowledge, reflection and understanding. It is not obedient to you; it obeys laws you cannot alter or corrupt. And since you can neither alter nor corrupt them you may trust them. They cannot fail.

The garage mechanic is not a scientist; yet he thinks scientifically. Observe him. There is trouble in the mechanism. The rhythm breaks. The power is lost or it may be only that there is a wrong sound. He takes your facts and entertains your opinion. Yet he does nothing overt at once. He listens, reflects, speeds up the engine and slows it down, cuts out one cylinder at a time by shorting the current across the tops of the spark plug, drives the car around the block, then leans against his bench and lights a cigarette. “I think I know where the trouble is,” he says. With that he enters the mechanism at a certain point, goes to the spot and there it is—what he thought it was.

Now consider what has occurred in this familiar instance. What was to be found was X, namely, the cause of trouble. There were many facts in several categories—historical facts of doubtful importance from you, facts of knowledge in his experience, facts of sensation in the particular case. How has he acted upon these? By methods of analysis, analogy, synthesis, as if, is as, induction, deduction, generalization and hypothesis. He may not know what an hypothesis is. If you should say to him that he has been thinking scientifically, or explain to him the process by which he arrived at his I-think, he would be surprised. He thinks scientifically without knowing that he does and calls himself a trouble shooter. The way of it comes from experience.

Sooner from observing machines than from observing ourselves we may come to precise ways of thinking, to an understanding of the natural principles of equivalence and reciprocation, applicable also to human affairs, and to such a generalization as that a thing is for what it is for. Each part of a machine is for what it is for. Each machine in the great scheme of machines is for what it is for. We make machines with organs and chemistries to simulate creature reactions to stimuli. All of them feel. Some of them see. There are now some to think mathematically, these substituting in drudgery for the mind as others substitute for the body; but how stupid it would be to expect them to think politically or philosophically. Perhaps man shall never know what it is he is for. Nevertheless he might very well know what his institutions and methods and specializations are for. He might know, for example, that physical science is neither for prophecy nor for handing down the social law. One would think the scientific mind as such would know this. But there has lately come over it a rage to prophesy, to say not only what is but what will be and should be in all things. And having said what ought to be believed it goes so far as to resent in the popular mind a lively scepticism, forgetting that scepticism is its own first virtue.

We are eminently the machine people. We have more machines than all other people in the world. Here the authority of science, resting upon facts and upon the thing that works, is such that no absurdity can diminish it. Credulity for that which may be demonstrated is unlimited. For the new fact there is a kind of appetite. Here at the same time is a scepticism from which science is no more immune than phrenology. Science giving law to man’s works is unchallenged; undertaking to give him also the law of his being, it is challenged. The behaviour of mind in the fundamentalist, even him in Tennessee, is somewhat like this. He asks: “Is there any scientific theory of the origin of human beings that can be proved on such evidence as would hang a man in Tennessee?” The answer is no. In that case he will believe what he likes. But believing in the theological doctrine of the special creation of man he will not for that reason reject a scientific fact in plant or animal biology, say it is impossible to make a fuelless engine or impugn science as a whole. He prays for rain. Science, he reads, thinks it can find a way to make rain. He remembers with a smile that science not long ago classed the idea of rain making with ideas of magic. If science can make it rain, so much the better. The fundamentalist will buy his rain, but he will not stop praying, nor will he agree that fact knowledge is the only kind of knowledge there is. Who shall say this is not a sound attitude toward science?

Knowledge, too, is for what it is for. A preference for the useful use of scientific knowledge lies deep in the American genius. It was the theme of Ben Franklin who may be taken as the founder of science in this country. A text for it will be found in one of the forgotten Lyceum Lectures delivered by Abraham Lincoln before he was elected President. “All creation,” he said, “is a mine, and every man a miner. In the beginning the mine was unopened and the miner stood naked and knowledgeless upon it. . . . Man is not the only animal that labors, but he is the only one that improves his workmanship.” And how strange, he added, that after the discovery of steam power it was two thousand years before the amazing thought occurred to anyone that it would move useful machines as well as toys.

This perfectly illustrates the difference between discovery and invention. Practical people will be very inventive in the application of scientific knowledge; it does not follow that they will make many new discoveries of their own. We are the most inventive people in the world; we excel in what is called applied science research, that is, in finding new ways to apply what is already known. But we have no such record in the field of pure science; we have made very few new discoveries. And that is why a national fund of $20,000,000—called the Hoover fund because it was his idea—now is being raised to support pure science research. Yet even here the end is practical. The anxiety is not to improve our standing in the world’s hall of pure fame; it is that our workers in the field of applied science may soon exhaust the stock of fact knowledge unless we take steps to increase it on our own account.

When Abraham Lincoln was speaking of discovery and invention in that Lyceum Lecture, year 1860, there were only five kinds of power in the world—man power, animal power, water, wind and steam. Since then two new powers have been added. Gas and electricity. At any instant another may be discovered. Where? There is no telling where or what or under what circumstances. The unknown is nowhere, meaning it is everywhere. It is in the common occurrence, in the familiar object, in the artless question, in the queer twist of a thought.

Man’s passion to pursue it is a fact he can give no account of. Always he has been afraid. Does he go on notwithstanding, or is it because he is afraid that he goes on? In one case a lonely hero in the universe; in the other case a brave planetarian who would sooner meet the dangers of knowledge than bear the terrors of superstition. Once he gets used to the idea it is much less appalling to live on a sphere whirling in space than on a flat world with edges sticking into the void. Life cannot fall off.

There is also the simple probability that he is a child in existence naturally growing up. Knowledge happens to him as he wants and needs it. That by taming wild energy he will imperil his soul more than he did by taming the wild grasses and beasts is absurd to suppose; and that it is any more likely he will destroy civilization with machines than it was that he would achieve that calamity with clubs cannot be proved as a scientific fact. As to that, your opinion or mine is as good as that of science. Whatever it is that runs ahead of us and beckons us on—it is not afraid.