Artificial

“ Nineteen years ago, when I commenced my own experiments, I was told that my reputation would be greatly injured, that mankind looked upon artificial flight as an ignis-fatuus, and that anyone who experimented in that direction was placed in the same category as those who sought to make perpetual-motion machines or to find the philosopher’s stone. ”

“ This important difference between artificial and natural selection deserves especial consideration. For we learn by it to understand how arrangements serving a purpose can be produced by mechanical causes acting without an object, as well as by causes acting for an object. ”

“ The first has been designated as the natural, and the other the artificial system; and, without entering into a critical disquisition on these definitions, it will be sufficient to observe, that by the Artificial System we bend nature to conform to certain arbitrary principles, which we lay down and to which we insist all her productions known and unknown will conform; while in the Natural method, we endeavour by tracing her modifications, to adapt our system to that which appears to regulate her operations. ”

“ Finally, we may say that, for every machine and structure, whether artificial or natural, there is set a necessary limit beyond which neither art nor nature can pass; it is here understood, of course, that the material is the same and the proportion preserved. ”

“ Artificial flowers, artificial fruits, artificial limbs, tobacco, rubber, silks, woolens, straws, gold, silver. The young men and women who manipulate razors and elastic cords are real, but not always. Williams and I once stood for a long while and gazed at a young woman posing in a drug-shop window, and argued whether she was alive. Ultimately she winked and Williams gloated over me. But how do I know her wink was real? At any rate the great mass of human life in the windows is artificial. The ladies who smile out of charming morning costumes are obviously of lining and plaster. ”

“ We see here, most instructively, how different the endeavor to frame such a natural system, is from the procedure of an artificial system, which carries imperatively through the whole of a class of organized beings, a system of marks either arbitrary, or conformable to natural affinities in a partial degree. ”

“ Human Artificials 3. Human Artificials. We have now to consider a class of entities which, though it contains but few individuals, has acquired from its intimate connection with one of the great movements of modern times an importance entirely out of proportion to its numbers. It seems doubtful whether it should appear under the first or third of our main divisions; but, though certainly human, it is so far removed from the course of ordinary evolution, so entirely the product of a will outside of its own, that it perhaps falls most naturally into place among the artificial beings. ”

“ The artificial system collects the materials for the edifice, but leaves them to lie without order and in confusion; the methodical or what has been called the natural system separates these materials and arranges them in homogeneous groups; the genetic, philosophical or truly natural, system, again mixes them amongst each other, but thereby actually erects the edifice. All three systems are therefore necessary and good, and no one of them merits being despised by the other ”

“ But the mechanical inventor left a heritage that was to add day by day to the wealth and happiness of humanity, supplying millions of artificial hands, and making possible such beneficent improvements as no previous age had dreamed of. Tasks that human hands had performed slowly, laboriously, and inadequately, were now to be performed swiftly, with ease, and well by the artificial hands provided with the aid of the new power. ”

“ In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture. ”

“ An Artificial Object is a product of human invention and construction. For every purpose of Economic classification, wild animals, like wild trees and wild bushes and wild Nature in all its varieties, belong in the category of Natural Resources. When the wild trees or the wild bushes are cultivated, or the wild animals are domesticated, they pass into the category—as manifestly as buildings and farm produce do—of Artificial Objects drawn forth from and upon Natural Resources by Man. ”

“ An artificial, or man-made, machine always implies an artificer, but the living machine is not made in any such sense; it grows, it arises out of the organizing principle that becomes active in matter under conditions that we only dimly understand, and that we cannot reproduce. ”

“ Indeed, a high authority says: “Though, since the human race began, all sorts of artificial agencies have been employed, and though there has been the closest scrutiny, yet not a distinctively new type of plant or animal, on what is called broad lines, has come into existence.” ”

“ But artificial structures imply artificers. And if the structures are so designed as to meet the needs of a living organism, it implies that the living organism that designed them must have a reasonable mind lodged in a natural body. ”

“ No machine that we may hope to devise, for the same weight of machine, fuel, and directing brain, is half so effective. And yet, this machine thus perfected through infinite ages by a ruthless process of natural selection, reaches its limit of weight at about fifty pounds! I said, "weight of machine, fuel, and directing brain." Here is another prodigious advantage of the natural over the artificial machine. The flying animal is its own engineer, the flying-machine must carry its engineer. ”

“ Our stage, remote in many ways from the wellspring (Ursprung) , consists of an appropriated environment within which the effort is to provide a pragmatic framework for high efficiency. Logic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics interact inside this framework. In other words, human evolution goes from sensorial anchoring in the natural world to an artificial (human crafted) world superimposed on the concrete reality-and eventually extended into artificial life, one from among the most recently established fields of scientific inquiry. ”

“ The efficacy of simple forces such as these can be increased in infinite diversity by the “construction of the apparatus” in which they operate. Life is the function of a quite unique, marvellously complex, inimitable combination of machines. If these be given, the most complex processes fulfil themselves of necessity and without the intervention of special vital forces. But how can they be “given”? The sole analogy to be found is the making of real machines, artificial products as distinguished from fortuitous products. They cannot be made without the influence and activity of intelligence. ”

“ Thus the essential point of the existence of the two principles has always been known, but the idea of their respective spheres and limits, of the efficient prevalence of each within our experience, has fluctuated in society. Art and handicraft are, of course, peculiarly competent to appreciate the artificial principle of order, while physical science is especially conversant with the natural one. ”

“ Artificial Things are only Natural Things shaped and brought together or separated by Men. Although this distinction between nature and art, between natural and artificial things, is very easily made and very convenient, it is needful to remember that, in the long run, we owe everything to nature; that even those artificial objects which we commonly say are made by men, are only natural objects shaped and moved by men ”

“ For example, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which are not artificial to us; they have nothing which marks the machine in their relation to the use for which the wheel is designed; but natural machines—that is, living bodies—are still machines in their minutest parts, ad infinitum. ”

“ As regards human intelligence, it has not been sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential feature, that even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments, that the inventions which strew the road of progress have also traced its direction. ”

“ And though, ordinarily, it does not yet succeed in fashioning artificial objects and in making use of them, it is preparing for this by the very variations which it performs on the instincts furnished by nature. ”

“ Cybernetics, biogenetics, computers, and research in artificial intelligence and artificial life, as well as political, social, aesthetic, or religious concepts are examples of domains where such sign systems have been devised. ”

“ But this advantage of intelligence over instinct only appears at a late stage, when intelligence, having raised construction to a higher degree, proceeds to construct constructive machinery. At the outset, the advantages and drawbacks of the artificial instrument and of the natural instrument balance so well that it is hard to foretell which of the two will secure to the living being the greater empire over nature. ”

“ From this point of view there is a very profound analogy between artificial and natural selection. Upon the theory of natural selection organisms are lifeless constructs which are mechanically perfected by external agency, just as machines are improved by a process of conscious selection of the most successful among a number of competing models. ”

“ It is thus clearly apparent that the phenomena of life are dependent upon the machinery of living things, and we have therefore the second question of the origin of this machinery to answer. Chemical forces and mechanical forces have been laboriously investigated, but neither appear adequate to the manufacture of machines. They produce only chemical compounds and worlds with their mountains and seas. The construction of artificial machines has demanded intelligence. But here is a natural machine—the organism. It is the only machine produced by natural methods, so far as we know ”

“ When Natural Classes of a certain small extent have been formed, a system may be devised which shall be regulated by a few selected characters, and which shall not dissever these small Natural Classes, but conform to them as far as they go. If these selected characters be then made absolute and imperative, and if we abandon all attempt to obtain Natural Classes of any higher order and wider extent, we form an Artificial System. ”

“ A fundamental difference between artificial machines and living organisms is that the former are worn out by use, while the latter not only repair the loss caused by use, but are also stimulated to further increase. ”

“ And among these, we wish that the History of Arts or Manufactures might first be undertaken as the most pleasant and profitable of all the rest, wherein should be discribed the whole Processe of Manual Operations and Applications of one Naturall thing (which we call the Elements of Artificials) to another, with the necessarie Instruments and Machines, whereby every peice of worke is elaborated, and made to be what it is, unto which work bare words being not sufficient, all Instruments and tooles must be pictured, and colours added when the discriptions cannot be made intelligible without them. ”

“ Many makers have realised this and have devised very ingenious implements, some of which we reproduce, though we are obliged to limit ourselves to certain types, for they can be varied in countless ways according to the needs of particular cases. ”

“ An essential distinction exists between two stages in the process of advancing our knowledge of the laws of physical phenomena; the first stage consists in observing the relations of phenomena, whether of such as occur in the ordinary course of nature, or of such as are artificially produced in experimental investigations, and in expressing the relations so observed by propositions called formal laws. The second stage consists in reducing the formal laws of an entire class of phenomena to the form of a science; ”

“ Another wonder is now promised us—an invention purely mechanical in its nature, by means of which words spoken by the human voice can be, so to speak, stored up and reproduced at will over and over again hundreds, it may be thousands, of times. What will be thought of a piece of mechanism by means of which a message of any length can be spoken on to a plate of metal—that plate sent by post to any part of the world and the message absolutely respoken in the very voice of the sender, purely by mechanical agency? ”

“ When we speak of a structure, or a machine, or a system, we simply mean a number of individual particles associated together in producing some definite result. Thus, the solar system, a timepiece, a rifle, are examples of inanimate machines; while an animal, a human being, an army, are examples of animated structures or machines. Now, such machines or structures are of two kinds, which differ from one another not only in the object sought, but also in the means of attaining that object. ”

“ It is included under the general term 'useful art.' An art may require one or more processes or machines in order to produce a certain result or manufacture. The term 'machine' includes every mechanical device or combination of mechanical powers and devices to perform some function and produce a certain effect or result. But where the result or effect is produced by chemical action, by the operation or application of some element or power of nature, or of one substance to another, such modes, methods, or operations are called 'processes.' A new process is usually the result of discovery ”