Man is an animal who laughs and cooks.
When Prometheus had caught some sparks from the chariot of the sun and
brought them safely to earth, hidden in a tube, there was consternation
on Mount Olympus. The Conservative Government of that privileged
stronghold trembled for its celestial prerogatives. It was all very
well, they said, for Hephæstus to blow his bellows in his workshop and
produce beautiful things for Olympians, so long as he did it under
proper supervision. But fire, once brought to earth, would set the
whole world ablaze and consume them in their palaces.
Hephæstus himself was not perturbed. Remembering the kindness he
met with on Lemnos after his brutal expulsion from the company of
the gods, he secretly sympathized with Prometheus and his race, and
planned a closer co-operation with mankind. His Sicilian workshops
saw him oftener than before, hobbling about among his furnaces and
experimenting with every kind of ore and ingot. Wherever he went,
whether among gods or men, his kindness and his merry humour made him a
general favourite.
Although he often made weapons, he much preferred to make tools and
ornaments. Among the Olympians, his strangely begotten “sister” Athene
was his closest ally. Like him, she favoured the arts of peace rather
than those of war, and despised the noisy and swashbuckling Ares.
When Athene went to take up her abode in her Parthenon at Athens, he
forsook Olympus and removed his furnaces to Lipari, off the Sicilian
coast. And it was in Sicily, some centuries later, that his great
disciple Archimedes was born, the man who was fitted and destined to
establish the reign of Hephæstus in spite of the strenuous opposition
of the Roman republic and its subsequent imperial and ecclesiastical
successors.
When man was endowed with fire he received the gift without knowing
whence it came or what it meant. Greek mythology, with its deep
insight into unseen things, presents us Helios, the sun-god, as a
friend of Hephæstus, the god of fire. We moderns express the same truth
differently. We say that all fire on earth is ultimately derived from
the sun. Archimedes kindled fires――preferably in Roman ships――by means
of concave mirrors which condensed the heat of the sun to a focus. The
fuel for the fires was also provided by the heat of the sun, absorbed
by the chlorophyll of the leaves in the forest and used to build up
combustible wood and other products. The firing of the wood reversed
the process of accumulation of solar energy and provided light and heat
by day and by night, independently of the sun, the original giver.
For a hundred million years already had the sun shone on a habitable
earth, pouring out its light and heat and nourishing the luxuriant
vegetation which covered most of the globe. For untold ages had the
plants stored up the sunlight for some unknown end. That end became
manifest when Prometheus kindled the first fire and made a new realm
accessible to man. Till then, mankind had undergone the annual and
daily vicissitudes of heat and cold due to the days and the seasons,
but he had not controlled them. When he acquired the mastery of fire,
he was enabled to wander north and south and take with him in his
brazier the accustomed heat of the tropics.
But there was more to come. The invention of pottery――another great
epoch――enabled him to create a solar furnace on a small scale. It
enabled him to create a miniature world where the heat was much greater
than in his own world. He soon found that plants and animals, passed
through this new world, became richer and more palatable, and in many
ways better adapted to his digestive system. It must have seemed highly
“unnatural” at first to accelerate the ripening of fruits and predigest
animal food by plunging them into water in which no living thing could
survive, but the departure from the habits of the animal world, once
begun, was never arrested, and it is still proceeding in our own day.
Our remote progenitors must have looked upon the guardians of their
fires with much the same awe as that which mediæval people felt for
sorcerers and alchemists, and with rather more justification. For man
had everything to learn about the new power placed in his hands. He
was beginning to find his way about a new world in which the ordinary
laws of Nature were suspended. Water was no longer cold and wet in that
world. It was hot as the sun and thin as smoke. It no longer flowed
but rose in the air. Salt rapidly became invisible in it, but could as
rapidly be recovered by adding more fire. There was as much to learn
about fire as there was about X-rays in 1895 and about “atmospherics”
to-day.
The possession of fire turned winter into summer and night into day.
It lengthened the life-time of its fortunate possessors. But it did
much more than that. It endowed mankind with a number of gifts which
must, in his primitive condition, have appeared to him as supernatural.
It gave him substances which combined the hardness of stone with the
toughness of wood. It enabled him to mould these substances into any
desired shape by the softening action of excessive heat. Hephæstus
himself cast his products in bronze, having cunningly mixed copper with
tin in order to produce an alloy combining hardness with ductility. But
he and his later disciples found the perfect substance in iron, which,
though requiring an extreme degree of heat, yielded weapons and tools
of unsurpassed power and strength.
And thus it was that Hephæstus and his human allies prepared that
career of conquest which eventually swept over the earth and made all
things new. The unprogressive Zeus, content with having learnt how to
shake Olympus with a nod of his head, perished in the flood of new
ideas from the East. Hephæstus, alone of all that shining company, had
established a firm footing in the world. For the work of his hands had
trained his brain and enabled it to build up a scheme of the cosmos
in which every detail corresponded to some ascertained reality. And
so, while Egyptian priests were speculating about the weight of a
soul, while Hindu sects were vying with each other in producing the
most hideous idols, and while Christian theologians were endeavouring
to prove that three ones make one, Hephæstus and his followers were
engaged in founding that superb edifice of knowledge which was destined
to outlast the fall of empires and the dark ages which followed the
eclipse of classical learning.
But even as late as 1800 A.D., in spite of the mariner’s compass,
the printing press, and gunpowder, the ground won by Hephæstus was
very small. The postal services in Europe were inferior to that of
the Cæsars, there was no telegraphic system equal to that of the
ancient Persians, and the most stately sailing ship barely excelled
the classical trireme. The fruits of the work of Newcomen and Watt and
Papin had not yet blossomed. When they did come forth, things happened
swiftly. Fire was made to generate steam, and steam, in the course
of a century, transformed the world. The motive-power being there,
it was put to a million uses. The Wheel became the most important of
mechanical contrivances. Now a wheel is a thing which, in the organic
world, is simply impossible. In the days when microscopes were of
feeble power, it was thought that the “wheel animalcule,” called
_Vorticella_, had small wheels revolving on the rim of its opening to
gather in the floating food particles. But higher magnifying power
showed that the appearance was an illusion created by the oscillation
of the fine hairs fixed round the aperture. A wheel revolving on a
shaft implies a separation which precludes all organic connection.
Had it been otherwise, an animal running on its own wheels would have
made its appearance on earth long ago. The shaft of the steam engine
could be provided with numerous pulleys, each capable of driving a
machine connected with it by a belt. Then arose that marvellous crop
of mechanical combinations which brought about the age of mechanism,
combinations which, in the last resort, can be reduced to sliding
couples and turning couples, and can be catalogued by means of formulæ,
like words in a dictionary. So numerous were these inventions, so
widespread was their use, and so great their effect on the minds of
those generations, that a great illusion arose which coloured the
philosophies of a whole century and has left traces even in modern
times. People became so accustomed to the perfect functioning of a
machine or a clock, so impressed with its regularity and intelligible
complexity, that they began to look upon mechanism as a primary thing
capable of “explaining” many non-mechanical things, not excluding
the phenomena of life. Why should not man himself, the inventor of
machinery, be a machine? If any functions of his body seemed beyond
explanation on mechanical lines, might this not be solely due to their
great complexity?
In a recent article in _Nature_, Professor Fraser Harris puts the
matter tersely as follows:
“Because the stomach ‘works’ rhythmically and predictably we may
call it a machine for turning out pepsin from blood and liken it to a
machine for turning out (say) newspapers, but the secretion of pepsin
is not mechanical, nor is the output of newspapers vital.”
The strangest point about the materialistic or mechanistic conception
of things is that every machine without exception has an inherent
purpose and design. It is intended by its inventor to do certain
definite things in a certain definite way. If an animal, therefore,
is a machine, it must have a design and purpose, and presumably a
designer. But the main idea underlying the mechanistic hypothesis was
to eliminate the idea of purpose altogether, and reduce the universe to
an accidental configuration of lifeless atoms.
It is difficult to see how this attempt to reverse the rôle of Potter
and Pot could ever have satisfied enquiring and well-balanced minds,
but it is a fact that mechanistic views of life, after a period of
almost general acceptance, are still prevalent among biologists whose
education in the principles of logic has been somewhat hurried.
The majority, however, have returned to the saner view that it is
useless to explain the known by the less known. Human purpose is a
primary fact of experience, and the embodiment of a human purpose in a
tool or machine is a process which cannot be denied on any reasonable
grounds. Now, a “purpose” is a datum of the mind, which cannot be
reduced to any simpler elements. The purpose of a machine is the
psychical element embodied in it. Briefly, we may call it the “soul
of the machine.” Every machine has a psychical element, a purpose,
a “soul.” It is therefore, simpler, more in accordance with sound
philosophical principles, more direct and “economical” to explain
machines in terms of psychology than to explain human bodies in terms
of mechanism.
The victories of Hephæstus are victories of mind over matter. The
“mechanical age,” which to some appears as the very negation of the
soul, is, on the contrary, the age of supreme psychical achievement.
Science and invention are for ever annexing fresh regions of the
universe and subjecting them to the free play of our mental faculties.
The process of bringing material things into subjection to our will is
a process of sublimation, which does not drag us down to the dust, but
raises up dust into the realms of immortal spirit.