I
Ethnologists believe that the metamorphosis from beast-like
savage to cultured civilian may be proximately explained as the
result of accumulated changes that found their initial impulses
in a half-a-dozen or so of practical inventions.
An Irish poet, disconsolately walking along Fleet Street one day,
bethought himself of a small island in an Irish lake, where he could
escape from the noise and bustle of the London streets. He wrote a
lovely poem embodying that thought, a poem expressing the longing of
every sensitive soul to retire within itself for a time and reconstruct
its world from within instead of having it impressed from without.
Needless to say, he did not content himself with planting nine
beans in a row, as he had longed to do in his fit of depression. On
the contrary. He became an Irish statesman and Senator. He dwelt
in surroundings far removed from the Stone Age. The very chair on
which he sat down to write owed its existence to many factories and
mechanical processes. Its wood was derived from planks cut in the
saw mills. Its French polish, although put on by hand, was made of
constituents――shellac, methylated spirit, whitening and what not――drawn
from many sources, each involving a number of ingenious inventions.
The coal which made his fire had been brought across the sea by a
steamer――a miracle of complicated mechanism――and the shovel with which
he put it on had been mined in Belgium, smelted in Germany, rolled in
Sheffield, and shaped and finished in Birmingham.
Not that “Inishfree” was but an idle dream. There are many such
islands in Ireland, peopled by men and women and children, living in
one-roomed mud hovels on potatoes and stewed tea, infested with vermin
and ravaged by tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, people who,
if they cannot emigrate, suffer their fate with a stolid and pathetic
resignation relieved by the hope of heavenly compensation hereafter.
Such is Inishfree, stripped of its glamour and shown in its naked
reality.
Savagery does not mean simplicity but complexity, not peace but
constant dread, not health but hopeless disease and premature death.
The South American Indian suffers acutely from constipation, which is
about the last disease we should expect him to suffer from. The negro
in his native Africa is often horribly deformed through neglect at
birth, neglected injuries, or the ravages of insect pests.
It has taken mankind ten thousand years to emerge from savagery into
barbarism, and from barbarism into civilization. Nor is the process
yet completed. The mass of mankind is still grossly ignorant. But the
leaven of knowledge is steadily working and pervading the mass, and the
rate of progress is constantly rising.
Let us trace this wonderful process of civilization to its origins and
probe its essential nature.
Starting somewhere in the tropics as a diminutive “sport” allied to
the arboreal ape, man learned to use tools and weapons. This was the
first step taken towards the conquest of the animal world, his natural
enemies.
We do not know how many ages elapsed before the rough stone hammer
evolved into the axe of polished flint. In any case, the rough stone,
even if only used for throwing at his enemy or killing his prey, was an
essentially new departure in evolution, and sounded the keynote to all
that followed down to our own times.
Tools and weapons had been evolved by other animals, but they were
always organically connected with their bodies. The tiger’s claws and
teeth, the tusks of the elephant and the wild boar, the beak of the
eagle were all formidable weapons and useful tools, but they could
neither be detached, nor replaced, nor exchanged for other tools more
suitable to the occasion. Those “natural” tools and weapons had all
been produced by “evolution,” in other words, by a mysterious agency
which some call God, some Adaptation, and some the Urge of Life.
Who was that audacious man who first took upon himself the divine
privilege of making tools and weapons for himself, instead of waiting
for “nature” to provide them for him?
Perhaps he was a puny boy, lame from birth and unable to escape from
the boar who was pursuing him. In the extremity of his terror he took
up a heavy stone from the ground and flung it at the boar with all his
might. The boar, we may well imagine, was dazed and probably terrified
by this unusual method of defence, and slunk away from his feeble but
resourceful antagonist. The story of that deliverance may, for all we
know, have been sung for many generations in the tribe, and who knows
but that the boy grew up into a great red-haired man, as great an adept
at stone-throwing as the street-urchins in Belfast, and formed the
prototype of the God Thor, whose hammer, when thrown, returned to his
hand of its own accord.
But the essential step was taken. The lad had no teeth or claws which
could match the solid tusks wielded by his mighty antagonist. So he
“invented” a new weapon. He did not grow it in his own organism, as
the squid grows its ink, to be used on one occasion and then gradually
renewed. He took a piece of the outside world and made it temporarily
a part of his person, a part which could be detached and resumed at a
moment’s notice, a temporary attachment or extension of his body which
required no blood-vessels to keep it in repair and which, if broken or
injured, would inflict no pain upon himself.
This great innovation may have been aided by some analogies in the
animal world. A bird had to collect twigs and leaves in order to build
a nest, and had thus to put a portion of the “outside world” to its own
uses. Besides, the very process of eating involved the apprehension of
outside objects, an apprehension which, in the case of the lowest form
of animal life, is to this day accomplished by pouring its jelly-like
body round the object to be consumed.
But the next invention, the discovery of the use of fire, was a
departure without a parallel to anything in the kingdoms of Nature.
It placed mankind by a single act in a position of god-like authority
over the living world. It is not surprising that the discovery of fire
is surrounded by countless legends. In Greek mythology the first use
of fire is attributed to Prometheus, the Fore-Thinker, the man who
thinks ahead. He stole it from the heavens, and was punished by Zeus
with terrible torment for having dared to endow mankind with a divine
privilege.
How great the privilege was we cannot even yet realize. For the uses
of fire are by no means exhausted, and are multiplying from day to
day. But the essential element of the change was that something came
into the hands of man which did not exist in “Nature” at all, not, at
least, in a manner ordinarily accessible to organic being. It was quite
“unnatural” to use fire. Fire represented a state in which no organism
could survive, in which all its functions were ruthlessly stopped, and
its living tissues destroyed. No animal except man has ever attained to
the use of fire. Its use represents the transcendence of man from the
ordinary scheme of Nature and his ascent into a sort of supernatural,
or at least super-organic realm.
From this step there has been no retreat, and there can be no retreat
until the sun itself grows cold. Whatever our “back-to-Nature” cranks
may say, mankind cannot repudiate and renounce its most precious
acquisition and all that it involves in the present and the future. We
may dislike the smoke of blast-furnaces, but the remedy is not to do
away with them, but to stop their smoking. The bellows of Hephæstus
are blowing and his fires are burning. The age of machinery, begun in
far-off Palæolithic days, but only established within the last hundred
years or so, has now gripped us in a scheme from which none may escape.
Taken in its narrower sense, the word “machine” means a contrivance
for increasing the force we can bring to bear upon objects until it
exceeds the limits imposed upon the tension of our muscles. As most of
the 400 voluntary muscles of the human body are attached to the bones
in a manner which diminishes the force exerted below the actual tension
of the muscles, the adoption of machinery constitutes a reversal of the
“natural” use of the system of levers which we call our skeleton. The
Lever, the Inclined Plane, the Wedge, the Pulley, the Wheel and Axle,
and the Screw, are all contrivances for slowing down the rate of work
until the force required to perform it comes within the compass of
our muscles. Our bones, on the other hand, are mostly levers “of the
third order,” in which the force is applied between the fulcrum and the
object to be moved. Thus it happens that in order to lift a weight of
one pound, our muscles are strained by a force which may amount to as
much as six pounds.
We are hardly justified in ascribing this uneconomic arrangement to the
“stupidity” of Nature. Any other arrangement, such as the use of levers
of the “second order,” would have involved a much bulkier and clumsier
build of the muscular system. Nor can we conceive of the adoption by
man of the Six Machines as a deliberate imitation of Nature, or an
improvement upon observed natural processes.
The Six Machines are obviously the crude results of long-continued
experience, and it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century
that their real significance in the system of mechanics was recognized.
The real importance of these contrivances lies in the fact that they
increase the power of the human body without any further evolution of
the human organism. The adoption of mechanism was a turning point in
evolution, and an event the significance of which can only be classed
with such far-reaching innovations as the birth of life itself or that
adoption of locomotion as an aid to nutrition which gave rise to the
animal kingdom.
The most widely useful of the Six Machines was undoubtedly the Wedge.
Its use was usually accompanied by that of the projected stone. The
latter, after being swung by muscular force, was a reservoir of
energy, which is the power of performing work. If brought to rest
within a shorter distance than the curve of the swing, it required a
correspondingly greater force to stop it. And that force could be still
further increased by applying it to the end of a wedge whose sides
bore upon the object to be split. The combination of mass and wedge is
represented by the spear, the arrow, and the sword, while the hammer
and the club acted as crushers rather than cutters.
Observe, then, this puny but formidable creature emerging from his
tropical forest. In his hand he carried the means of annihilating that
continuity of the organism which is essential to its existence. He was
able to drive a powerful and irresistible wedge into the body of his
antagonist and thus end the co-ordination of its natural functions. It
was thus that, later in history, the Macedonian phalanx split up the
armies of the Persian kings. By a different but essentially similar
process the 15-inch naval gun drives a wedge clean through the armour
of its opponent, in the shape of a shell which does not explode until
it is right inside the enemy ship.
Man’s war of conquest against the animal world had begun. He brought to
them a death more sudden than had existed up to his time. For he had
the power of driving his wedge into the most vulnerable and essential
part of his enemy’s body. A clean cut inflicted at the appropriate
point would mean his final end. Man was not long in discovering
his enemy’s weaknesses. And when his enemy was a human one, he made
assurance complete by bringing home his head.[2]
[2] It is curious in this connection that among the legends of
the Saints there is no record of a decapitated person being
brought back to life. The angels or departed saints who came
to heal the torn breasts of martyred Christian virgins were
unable to put heads back on bleeding trunks, even though the
tongues in some of those heads were empowered to testify for
some time after they would, in the ordinary course of things,
have become silent for ever.
If we examine the connection between man and his weapon we find that
the latter differs from an eagle’s beak or a tiger’s claw in but one
essential point: it is no longer an integral part of the organism. It
can be detached at will, and replaced by another weapon. Its separation
or destruction does not imply an injury to the organism. Man is not
put out of action by losing his weapon. He is only reduced to his
original position with respect to his antagonist. And even that is no
irreparable loss so long as he has other weapons at his command. Thus
the same step which vastly increased his offensive power also made him
comparatively immune to attack.
Now, a weapon in a man’s hand, so long as it is in active use as a
weapon, is a part of the man himself. It is true that he can lose it
without perishing himself, but he can also lose an arm or a leg and
still survive. The mere fact that the man’s blood circulates in his
natural leg and not in a wooden leg he may substitute for it makes
no essential difference. He may kick with either. And we know that
a man’s leg, like all the cells of his body, is largely compound
of inert matter such as food products and waste products, besides
being nine-tenths water――an inorganic substance. A wooden leg, or any
weapon which a man may use, may therefore be regarded as a limb of the
man’s body, so long, that is, as it is in active use. And if a “soul”
animates that man’s body and drives it to perform deeds of valour, the
same soul will animate his weapon. The soul of the weapon is the soul
of the man who uses it.
There is an increasing tendency in modern thought to abolish the
distinction between soul and body and to regard them as one and
indivisible. Adopting that view, we may assert that the use of a weapon
means the enlargement of a man’s body and the simultaneous expansion
of his soul. Every weapon, every tool, every machine is the embodiment
of a human thought and purpose. The user adopts that thought and
purpose, and behold――the machine has found its soul!