Mechanism (philosophy)

“ The concept of mechanism suits the phenomena which occur within the zone of wreckage, on this shore of fixities and corpses. But life itself is rather finality, if not in the anthropomorphic sense of premeditated design, plan, or programme, at least in this sense, that it is a continually renewed effort of growth and liberation. ”

“ For physics may explain, in some measure, the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing or rather of choosing, and in the feeling of this power, nothing is to be found but acts which are purely spiritual and wholly inexplicable by the laws of mechanism. ”

“ But we must not forget that his high place among contemporary thinkers was first won as a philosopher. A closely knit system his is, indeed. But what a system! A system of mechanism and fatality, dealing with the universe as an immense and eternal series of visible movements, more or less complex, all reducible to invisible movements, obeying the laws of physics. Reason, intelligence, will, personality are for him mere metaphors. He reduces them all to mechanism and movement. The intellect he regards as a thinking machine, just as the stomach is a digesting machine. ”

“ Mechanism is universal, because it is the raw material, so to speak, out of which reality is to be made. That [Pg 109] reality can be expressed in terms of mechanism is true, just as a poem can be described as a scrap of paper scratched upon with a pen; but this reduction of reality to its lowest terms, ends by emptying reality of content. ”

“ When we learn that this is so, we see that the effect is produced by a mechanical arrangement far more simple than any which the imagination of man had devised; but in this case, the effect is plainly rather an increased admiration at the simplicity of the mechanism, than a wavering belief in the reality of the purpose. ”

“ And there seems to be no reply to this inquiry, any more than to the further, not irrational, question, why trouble oneself about matters which are out of reach, when the working of the mechanism itself, which is of infinite practical importance, affords scope for all our energies? ”

“ Final causes, vital and mental forces, the soul itself can, if they act at all, only act through the inexorable mechanism of natural laws. As we therefore have only to do with the study of existing complexes of material and spiritual phenomena, the changes in these must be explained in science by the rule of mechanical laws, such as obtain everywhere in the world, and only by such. One of the results of these investigations was to extend the meaning of the word mechanism, and comprise under it all laws which obtain in the phenomenal world, not excepting the phenomena of life and mind. ”

“ He starts from reflex action in man, from the unquestionable fact that, in ourselves, co-ordinate, purposive, actions may take place, without the intervention of consciousness or volition, or even contrary to the latter. As actions of a certain degree of complexity are brought about by mere mechanism, why may not actions of still greater complexity be the result of a more refined mechanism? ”

“ However slow and gradual the steps by which man has been produced, and however mechanical in one aspect the process, it may be insisted that a [Pg 72] mechanism so perfect as to produce the varied forms of organic life, culminating in man, with his mental and moral endowments, is as strong evidence as could be produced of purpose as the ultimate and only explanation of the mechanism. ”

“ Such would be, as if a man possessing a curious and exquisite piece of mechanism were to direct the observers to remark the beauty of the material, the regularity of the movements, and the certainty of the results, and yet to forbid them to examine into the principle of construction and the mode of operation, on which those movements and that certainty depend. ”

“ Moreover that evidence would be fatal to the mechanical theory itself — for a mechanism admitting of direction could not be a closed system — and so with the fall of the theory would fall also the objections to our common-sense conviction that were based upon it. ”

“ Mechanism, the first form of objectivity, is also the category which primarily offers itself to reflection, as it examines the objective world. It is also the category beyond which reflection seldom goes. It is, however, a shallow and superficial mode of observation, one that cannot carry us through in connexion with Nature and still less in connexion with the world of Mind. In Nature it is only the veriest abstract relations of matter in its inert masses which obey the law of mechanism. ”

“ No mechanical contrivance, no mechanism furnishes any power, but is only a means of applying power; and, even if the term mechanical embraces all the phenomena of matter in motion, we still have the question as to whether the mechanism or the matter moves by its own power, or is moved by the effort of some intelligent being. ”

“ How a positivistic science, making all knowledge wait on actual experience, and accepting all knowledge only tentatively, can ever be mechanicalistic or appeal to the ordinary understanding as an argument for the mechanicalistic view of things is hard to conceive. If one reasons from known forms to uniform activities, must one not also reason from the always provisional [p.221] and developing knowledge to productive activities? Must not the mechanism evolve into something more, adding something to man's life, realizing something for all life, enlarging even the nature of God himself? ”

“ It is said again, that to deny this control “involves the absurdity that our volitions are exerted without any intelligent reasons, and are the result of a brute or senseless mechanism.” It appears to me, however, that a system which represents the will as mechanically governed by motives, as weights turn the scale beam, makes man a machine; while the theory that gives the mind a spontaneous power and energy of its own, makes him what he is, an intelligent, responsible agent. ”

“ Omnipresent non-livingness or mechanism with appearances as though the mechanism were guided and controlled by thought—which appearances are deceptive; this is the other. Between these two views the slaves of logic have oscillated for centuries, and to all appearance will continue to oscillate for centuries more. ”

“ The chain of material causes and effects is not affected by the motives and feelings which prompt an action, but solely by the action itself; and the purposes of mere physical existence would be as well (if not better) promoted by an unerring mechanism as by the agency of free beings. ”

“ In living beings processes such as that of digestion are mechanical effects which have as principles, rest and movement. We here see the ground and origin of the mechanical philosophy; but further on we find that this is unsatisfactory, for matter and motion do not suffice to explain life. Yet the great matter in all this is that thought goes forward in its determinations, and that it constitutes from these thought-determinations the truth of nature. ”

“ Starting with a hundred instincts such as this, that older unmechanical, spiritual, or Platonic, philosophy envisages nature rather as the unity of a living spirit or person, revealing itself in various degrees to the kindred spirit of the observer, than as a system of mechanical forces. ”

“ In art, religion, science, philosophy, politics, the minds that organize are organic minds, not mechanical understandings.
The principle we have indicated, applies to all matters of human concern, the simplest as well as the most complicated. Let us first take a familiar instance from ordinary life. In the common intercourse of society we are all painfully conscious of the dominion of the mechanical, prescribing manner, proscribing nature. ”

“ Hence I conceive it is that when we see two events constantly conjoined, we are led to associate the idea of causation or efficiency with the former, and to refer to it that power or energy by which the change is produced; in consequence of which association we come to consider philosophy as the knowledge of efficient causes, and lose sight of the operation of mind in producing the phenomena of nature. ”

“ The freest allowance is given to the scientific conception of mechanism in this series of philosophical ‘Outlines.’ But the reader should never forget that in the view of Lotze, ‘Mechanism’—or the coherency of the phenomena according to fixed laws of action—is only the means or ‘way of behavior’ which the highest Idea, the Idea of the Good, has chosen to realize itself. ”

“ Control of the mechanism is a very simple matter when the mental concept is formed. It is then only a question of learning how to relax, how to free the mechanism of tension, and the response becomes automatic. ”

“ The grand universe is mechanism as well as organism, mechanical and living—a living mechanism activated by a Supreme Mind, co-ordinating with a Supreme Spirit, and finding expression on maximum levels of power and personality unification as the Supreme Being. But to deny the mechanism of the finite creation is to deny fact and to disregard reality.
Mechanisms are the products of mind, creative mind acting on and in cosmic potentials. Mechanisms are the fixed crystallizations of Creator thought, and they ever function true to the volitional concept that gave them origin. ”

“ To which may be added, that, in Nature, when the higher or organic functions are in any way checked or disturbed in their normal efficiency, the otherwise subordinate category of mechanism is immediately seen to take the upper hand. ”

“ So much then for the mischievous authorities of systems, which are founded either on common notions, or on a few experiments, or on superstition. It remains to speak of the faulty subject-matter of contemplations, especially in natural philosophy. Now the human understanding is infected by the sight of what takes place in the mechanical arts, in which the alteration of bodies proceeds chiefly by composition or separation, and so imagines that something similar goes on in the universal nature of things. ”

“ And the essential affirmation of mechanism being that of a reciprocal mathematical dependence of all the points of the universe, as also of all the moments of the universe, the reason of mechanism had to be discovered in the unity of a principle into which could be contracted all that is juxtaposed in space and successive in time. ”

“ There can be no wider interval in philosophy than the separation which must exist between the laws of mechanical force and motion, and the laws of free moral action. Yet the tendency of men to assume, in the portions of human knowledge which are out of their reach, a similarity of type to those with which they are familiar, can leap over even this interval. ”

“ THE PLACE OF MIND IN NATURE.—One of the very first questions which we think of asking when we contemplate the possibility that the physical world is throughout a mechanical system is this: How can we conceive minds to be related to such a system? That minds, and many minds, do exist, it is not reasonable to doubt. What shall we do with them?
One must not misunderstand the mechanical view of things. When we use the word "machine," we call before our minds certain gross and relatively simple mechanisms constructed by man. ”

“ But when we come to a more minute analysis of the functional activities, and endeavor to assign their respective values to each part of the organic mechanism, the excessive complexity and delicacy of the mechanism baffles research. We are forced to grope our way ”

“ Let us not, then, be surprised, if, when man would account to himself for his existence, for his manner of acting, finding so many obstacles to encounter, he invented such strange hypotheses to explain the concealed spring of his machine—if then this motion appeared to him, to be different from that of other bodies, he conceived an idea, that he moved and acted in a manner altogether distinct from the other beings in Nature. ”

“ It is, indeed, the spirit of this system alone, which gives any sense whatever to the distinction that is universally made of causes, as physical and efficient,—a distinction which implies, that, beside the antecedents and consequents, in a series of changes, which are supposed to have no mutual influence, and might, therefore, be antecedent and consequent in any other order,—there is some intervening agency, which is, in every event of the series, the true efficient. Matter, in short, does not act on mind, nor mind on matter. ”

“ The activity of this mechanism is dependent upon many and complicated conditions, some of which are hopelessly beyond our control, while others are readily accessible and are capable of being indefinitely modified by our own actions. ”

“ Then again, if two or more forces in different directions act upon a material object, its motion is not in the direction of either, or with the momentum derived from either, but in a direction and with a momentum resulting from the composition of these forces; whereas the human will, in the presence of two or more motives, pursues the direction and yields to the force of but one of those motives. We are not, then, authorized to reason about the power of motives from the action of material forces. ”

“ An activity, straining for liberation against some resistance by which nevertheless it was itself made effectual, could—we are driven to think—do no other than find its way imperfectly and by slow degrees; yet on its way it has shown even in very lowly creatures signs of what it really is. That any 'substance' the mechanist can acknowledge has done this of its own motion and power, we take leave to doubt. And we have learnt to understand the mechanist. ”