Mechanism

“ Every function of which we explain the course, the mechanism, or the chemistry, is connected with other functions,—is subservient to them, and they to it; and all together are parts of the general vital system of the animal, ministering to its life, but deriving their activity from the life. Life is not a collection of forces, or polarities, or affinities, such as any of the physical or chemical sciences contemplate ”

“ Given that force can be exerted by an act of will, do we understand the mechanism by which this is done? And if there is a gap in our knowledge between the conscious idea of a motion and the liberation of muscular energy needed to accomplish it, how do we know that a body may not be moved without ordinary material contact by an act of will? ”

“ Such a science is the science of Mechanism, independent of force, and considered as the solution of a problem which may be thus enunciated: ‘To communicate any given motion from a first mover to a given body.’ The science which should have for its object to solve all the various cases into which this problem would ramify, might be termed Pure Mechanism, in contradistinction to Mechanics Proper, or Machinery, in which Force is taken into consideration. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In ordinary thinking we are as little conscious of the particular steps—our interest being concentrated on the result—as we are of the particular stages426 of an action. The adjustments of the mechanism of Reproduction and Association are set going by a motive, and kept going by psychological motors. And here—as in bodily actions—there is often a conflict between motive and motors—between the foreseen result, and the available means of reaching it—the motors usually prevailing because they represent the active side of the mechanism. ”

“ If the organism is a mechanism, its actions must of course be interpretable on mechanical principles. But this general truth requires a special interpretation, if on inquiry we find that the organism is a particular kind of mechanism, one which is not to be classed under the same head as inorganic machines. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In bringing the wheels together, and making all the adjustments, we create neither force nor quality—in separating them and breaking the connections, we destroy nothing. The same is true of all mechanism, and indeed of all organisms. ”

“ The fuller knowledge has been gained by viewing the objects under different relations, and contemplating them in their modes of production, not as merely visible products. He sees the mechanism performing by steel springs,385 wheels, and wires, the work which the organism performs by bones, muscles, and nerves; and the farther his analysis of the modes of production is carried, the greater are the differences which he apprehends. ”

“ I shall not in this volume touch upon still more puzzling and still more directly and peculiarly physical phenomena, such as are spoken of as 'direct voice,' 'direct writing,' and 'materialisation.' In these strange and, from one point of view, more advanced occurrences, though lower in another sense, inert matter appears to be operated on without the direct intervention of physiological mechanism. ”

“ Hence when useful work can be obtained from a system by simply connecting visible portions of it by a train of mechanism, such energy is more readily recognized than is that which would compel us to control the behaviour of molecules before we could transform it into useful work. ”

“ When we examine the internal structure of a plant or animal, a wonderful subtility of mechanism is displayed. Man, in his mechanical operations, is confined to the surface of bodies. But the operations of nature are exerted through the whole substance, so as to reach even the elementary parts. ”

“ It seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility—that is knowledge—which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. ”

“ The moment the equilibrium is reëstablished, the tissues assume their functions the same as before. If a given number of specific parts enter into the construction of any mechanism in order to produce a certain amount of force and effect, the number of specific parts must always be present if the same force and effect is to be realized. ”

“ 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 ”

“ An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automaton, is the most developed form of production by machinery. ”

“ The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes. ”

“ We have, therefore, in our nervous system mechanisms which work automatically, and produce a series of contractions directed to one object, which [48] may, at first sight, appear voluntary, but is, in reality, mechanical and unconscious. Some of these mechanisms we bring into the world with us. ”

“ But there is a much greater disproportion between action and reaction when the friction of a match blows up a powder factory, or the turning of a switch lights the lamps and animates the tramways and the motors of a great city. The disproportion between action and reaction is therefore no characteristic of life. ”

“ Every function, as representing a state of more or less perfect, moving equilibrium, may be regarded either as the final form issuing from a long process of action and reaction or, as determined at present, by such a comparative constancy of all its conditions as makes the line followed by the resultant approximately a repetition of that which it has followed before; and we may lay stress upon either the inferior resistance in this line or the continual application of superior force, the accumulation of energy, in its direction. Use or exercise is function ”

“ It is proved by numerous facts, both natural and of artificial production, that agencies which had been regarded as distinct and independent sources of force—heat, electricity, chemical action, nervous and muscular action, momentum of moving bodies—are interchangeable, in definite and fixed quantities, with one another. It had long been known that these dissimilar phenomena had the power, under certain conditions, of producing one another: what is new in the theory is a more accurate estimation of what this production consists in. ”

“ In point of fact, however, I am in relation with the energetic system not merely or primarily as an Intelligence percipient of the transmutations proceeding in it at a particular point, but also as a Will initiative to some extent of such transmutations and capable of influencing and directing the physical process. Life necessarily involves a process of energetic transmutation constantly proceeding at that portion of the system of Energy which constitutes my organism, and I am there related as Will with a larger system which embraces the part in which intelligence is developed. ”

“ We conceive an organized body to be one in which the parts are there for the sake of the whole, in a manner different from any mechanical or chemical connexion; we conceive a function to be not merely a process of change, but of change connected with the general vital process. When mechanical or chemical processes occur in the living body, they are instrumental to, and directed by, the peculiar powers of life. ”

“ Is it to cause a body to act in such a manner that the reaction shall be greater than the action itself, and by that means generate force by the accumulation of the surplus? Or, can the motion communicated be greater than that lost by the agent? ”

“ Within the body there go on many changes, mechanical, chemical, thermal, no one of which is the kind of change in question; and if we combine in thought so far as we can these kinds of changes, in such wise that each maintains its character as mechanical, chemical, or thermal, we cannot get out of them the idea of Life. Still more clearly do we see this insufficiency when we take the more abstract definition—"the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." ”

“ Force.—When the faculties of observation and thought are developed in man, the idea of causation is applied to those changes which we see and feel in the state of rest and motion of bodies around us. And when our abstract conceptions are thus formed and named, we adopt the term Force, and use it to denote that property which is the cause of motion produced, changed, or prevented. This conception is, it would seem, mainly and primarily suggested by our consciousness of the exertions by which we put bodies in motion. ”

“ Their differences are complementary, not antagonistic; and thought will never be completely fruitful until the one unites with the other. Let me try to explain what I mean. I hold, with the Materialist, that the human body, like all living bodies, is a machine, all the operations of which will, sooner or later, be explained on physical principles. I believe that we shall, sooner or later, arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, just as we have arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat. ”

“ Proposition XXV.
Each compound substance consists of matter and form, and requires an agent for its existence, viz., a force which sets the substance in motion, and thereby enables it to receive a certain form. The force which thus prepares the substance of a certain individual being, is called the immediate motor. ”

“ Vital forces, or the vital force, if we adopt the term for brevity’s sake, is a symbol of the conditions of existence of organized matter; and since organisms are specially distinguishable from anorganisms by this speciality of their synthesis, and not by any difference in the nature of the elements combined, this state of organization is the “force” or “principle” of which we are in quest. To determine what Life means, we must observe and classify the phenomena presented by living beings. ”

“ The force which the plant stores up is undeniably physical; must not the force which the animal sets free by its conversion, be intimately correlated to it?
But approaching our question still more closely, let us, in illustration of the vital forces of the animal economy, choose three forms of its manifestation in which to seek for the evidences of correlation; these shall be heat, evolved within the body; muscular energy or motion; and lastly, nervous energy, or that form of force which, on the one hand, stimulates a muscle to contract, and on the other, appears in forms called mental. ”

“ If it is a mechanical force, then the immediate effect is some distortion of the part—a distortion having for its limit that attitude in which the resistance of the structures to further change of position, balances the force tending to produce the further change; and the ultimate effect, supposing the force to be continuous or recurrent, is such a permanent alteration of form, or alteration of structure, or both, as establishes a permanent balance. ”

“ Before we leave this subject of mechanical adaptation, let us dwell once more for a moment upon the con­si­de­ra­tions which arise from our conception of a field of force, or field of stress, in which tension and compression (for instance) are inevitably combined, and are met by the materials naturally fitted to resist them. It has been remarked over and over again how harmoniously the whole organism hangs together, and how throughout its fabric one part is related and fitted to another in strictly functional correlation. ”

“ It requires the establishment of types of reaction which remain uniform so long as their maintenance satisfies the attainment of the end towards which they are directed, and at the same time the power of modifying those types of reaction from time to time so as to meet fresh situations encountered or created in the progressive attainment of that end. In our own individual physical life these two conditions are found as the power to form habits, and the power to initiate spontaneously fresh response to variation in the environment. ”

“ But how “mechanical happening” comes to have this marvellous inwardness, which we call sensation, feeling, perception, thought and will, which is neither mechanical nor derivable from anything mechanical; and, further, how physical and psychical can condition one another without doing violence to the law of the conservation of the sum of energy, is an absolute riddle. ”

“ We find such truths universally established and assented to among the cultivators of science, and among speculative men in general. All mechanicians agree that reaction is equal and opposite to action, both when one body presses another, and when one body communicates motion to another. All reasoners join in the assertion, not only that every observed change of motion has had a cause, but that every change of motion must have a cause. ”