Metics

“ 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. ”

“ Why should we not reach forward and establish that which surely our posterity will establish—that this body of ours is mechanical, that its organs are mechanical, that its senses are mechanical, the intellect, the reason, and the soul itself. ”

“ The conceptions of force and matter, of action and reaction, of momentum and inertia, with the reasonings in which they are involved, cannot be evaded by any substitution of lines or symbols for the conceptions. Any attempts at such substitution would render the study of Mechanics useless as a preparation of the mind for physical science; and would, indeed, except counteracted by great natural clearness of thought on such subjects, fill the mind with confused and vague notions, quite unavailing for any purposes of sound reasoning. ”

“ This Creative Will is not a mere blind, mechanical energy or force—it is far more than this. We can explain it only by referring you to the manifestation of the Will in yourself. You wish to move your arm, and it moves. The immediate force may seem to be a mechanical force, but what is back of that force—what is the essence of the force? The Will! All manifestations of energy—all the causes of motion—all forces—are forms of the action of the Will of the One—the Creative Will—acting under natural laws established by the One, ever moving, acting, forcing, urging, driving, leading. ”

“ Now, can we say of the atom and motion combined, behold the universe? Yes, the mechanical universe, perhaps. But the mechanical universe is not self-sufficing; for we can always say, Who has made the atom? who has created motion? And then we have the right to propose another affirmation and to conclude: the notion of causality is the entire world—the physical, intellectual, and moral world. ”

“ But just as we draw from the stores of our own consciousness this idea of "Power," of force, of muscular or mental energy, precisely in the same way we are justified in drawing the idea of "purpose" in the direction of that energy. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Man’s mechanics move as man’s mind mandates. Mere mechanical-man, muscular-man, means microcosmic majesty, but man’s moral mentality, mysteriously manifests man’s Mighty Maker’s magnificent, matchless majesty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I contented myself now, however, with this general remark, That God sufficiently compensated the natural weakness of man by the gifts of reason, invention, and the adroitness of the hands; and that human meditation and reflection had composed a science called mechanics, the object of which was, to teach us how to make our own natural strength act to an incredible distance and with extraordinary force, by the intervention of instruments. ”

“ If we accept this account of mechanics, we are at once puzzled by the fact that most mechanical theories make assumptions about the forces at work in the world, and that all of them predict coming facts. But forces form no part of the experience or of the mere description of motion. ”

“ The more chemistry, and electrology, and life, are searched into by the keenest and most remorseless experiment, the more do we find ourselves admitting that motive power and force, as manifested to us, is derived, is in its essence immaterial, is direct from Him in whom we live and move, and to whom, in a sense quite peculiar, belongeth power. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many men of science, however, are also philosophers, and hold, as they are fully entitled to hold, that the mechanical theory is the true interpretation of nature. Now, "mechanics is the science of motion; we can assign as its object: to describe completely and in the simplest manner the movements which occur in nature." [13] On the mechanical theory, therefore, "the object of all science is to reduce the phenomena of nature to forms of motion, and to describe these completely and in the simplest manner ... ”

“ And conversely the process is reversed when what we call will is excited, and the small currents of the intellectual area are concentrated by an effort of attention and sent along the proper nerve-channels to the motor-centres, whose function it is to produce the desired movement. This mechanical explanation, it will be observed, leaves entirely untouched the question of the real essence and origin of these intellectual faculties, as to which we know nothing more than we do of the real essence and origin of life, of matter, and of energy. ”

“ Mechanics deals with the laws of energy and motion, physics with molecular changes of matter, but neither physics nor mechanics would have gone far, had they stopped to answer the questions as to what motion, energy, matter are in themselves. ”

“ As we have learned already, when we pass from the statement that the processes of the physical order may, for the purpose of description by general formulæ, and the invention of practical methods for their production, be treated as to all intents mechanical, to the very different assertion that the physical order really is rigidly mechanical, we have deserted empirical science for dogmatic Metaphysics, and our metaphysical dogma must stand or fall by its own ultimate coherency and intelligibility as a way of thinking about Reality. ”

“ For example, there are mechanical laws and equations which admirably explain the facts of motion, yet sentiment is shocked at the attempt to explain Nature on mechanical principles only, and is sustained by common-sense, which sees other facts besides facts of motion, and sees that Nature is not mechanical only. ”

“ What would there be strange in the mechanician, after constructing the most beautiful and ingenious piece of mechanism it is possible to conceive of, speaking to it and admiring the beauty, regularity and order of its motions? ”

“ Using the phraseology of physical science may help a good deal to understand what we mean. Of the total force of every action of a man–including thought and word also in the word action–one part goes off as kinetic energy and that is represented by its visible effects that appear immediately the action is ended. ”

“ The history of mechanical philosophy, while it strongly illustrates in its general results the force of the human mind, exhibits in its details most interesting pictures of ingenuity struggling with the conception of new combinations, and of deep, intense, and powerful thought, stretched to its utmost to find out or deduce the general principle from the indications of particular facts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In effect, this traditional supposed proof of God's existence resolves itself fundamentally into hypostatizing or substantivating the explanation or reason of a phenomenon; it amounts to saying that Mechanics is the cause of movement, Biology of life, Philology of language, Chemistry of bodies, by simply adding the capital letter to the science and converting it into a force distinct from the phenomena from which we derive it and distinct from our mind which effects the derivation. ”

“ It would be senseless to raise aesthetic difficulties in chemistry or mechanics, but it is no better to reason that because a medium is required for physical objects, movements, forces to combine their effects in one resultant, therefore, a medium, a substance, a soul, is also required for a synthesis of a totally different order of phenomena, those of consciousness. ”

“ All is comprehended in a fixed mechanical operation of certain machinery, and, when we have analyzed and understood the physical phenomena, we can follow them no further, because there is no translation of the physical energy into mental phenomena. ”

“ Mechanics formulates consecutive phenomena, and it does so semeiologically, in the terms of the senses and of the mind (that all influence is movement; that where there is movement something is at work moving) : it does not touch the question of the causal force. ”

“ And finally, the physical splendour of light and colour, so far from being the perception of a mechanical force by a mechanical instrument, is an entirely spiritual consciousness, accurately and absolutely proportioned to the purity of the moral nature, and to the force of its natural and wise affections. ”

“ To us, Science has laid open our own spiritual being, and thereby, in a great measure, subjected to our will the outward physical forces of the universe. Mechanical science has multiplied, almost to infinity, the feeble powers of man, and continues to multiply them. ”

“ When, after attempting to comprehend the exquisite adaptation of the swallow or the albatross to the navigation of the air, we try to pass beyond the empirical study and contemplation of such perfection of mechanical fitness, and to ask how such fitness came to be, then indeed we may be excused if we stand wrapt in wonderment, and if our minds be occupied and even satisfied with the conception of a final cause. ”

“ Now, we have already contended that the aims of Psychology only partially and temporarily coincide with those of the mechanical sciences. If we were right in holding that the principal object of Psychology is to provide a general terminology of which History and Ethics can avail themselves in their appreciations of life, it follows at once that Psychology imperatively needs the recognition of that very teleological aspect of human action which is excluded on principle, and rightly so for the special purpose of mechanical Physics, by the fundamental mechanical postulates. ”

“ To account for this in some degree, I might observe that mechanical dexterity is confined to doing some one particular thing, which you can repeat as often as you please, in which you know whether you succeed or fail, and where the point of perfection consists in succeeding in a given undertaking.—In mechanical efforts you improve by perpetual practice, and you do so infallibly, because the object to be attained is not a matter of taste or fancy or opinion, but of actual experiment, in which you must either do the thing or not do it. ”

“ To the mechanic there are the continual forces of nature, gravitation uttering itself in all its majesty, made no less majestic because it simply takes its expression for the moment in some particular exercise of his art. ”

“ Some philosophers have divided all created beings into material and immaterial: the former including all that part of being, which obeys the mechanic laws of action and reaction, but which can begin no motion of itself; the other is the cause of all motion, and is either termed the power of gravity, or of specific attraction, or the spirit of animation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is only when physical "things" have been dissected into series of classes of particulars, as we have done, that the conflict between the point of view of physics and the point of view of psychology can be overcome. ”

“ When a certain degree of energy of contraction rather than another is thought of by us, this complex aggregate of afferent feelings, forming the material of our thought, renders absolutely precise and distinctive our mental image of the exact strength of movement to be made, and the exact amount of resistance to be overcome. ”