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Updated: May 14, 2025
It was only about the middle of the last century that the younger generation, under the leadership, in Germany, of Du Bois-Reymond in particular, went over decidedly to the mechanistic side, and carried the doctrines of the school to ever fresh victories. But opposition was not lacking from the outset, though it was restrained and cautious. Virchow’s “Caution”.
Finally, the mechanistic explanation might have remained universal in this, that it can indeed be extended to as many systems as we choose to cut out in the continuity of the universe; but mechanism would then have become a method rather than a doctrine.
And thus all those experiments and theories on what we have called the “second line” of mechanistic interpretation of the universe show themselves to be relevant to our present subject. Interpretations of the psychical such as these have given rise to four peculiar “isms” of an epistemological nature, i.e., related to a theory of knowledge.
Apart from the inherent general “instinct”—sit venia verbo, for no more definite word is available—which is the quiet Socius, the concealed but powerful spring of the mechanistic convictions, as of most others, this law of the conservation of energy is probably the really central argument, and it meets us again more or less disguised in what follows. The Organic and the Inorganic.
The mechanistic instinct of the mind is stronger than reason, stronger than immediate experience.
So this great spirit, who might have given to mankind a book worthy to stand beside the Imitation, and given to England a new enthusiasm for the moral principles of Christianity, nurses a mechanistic dream and cherishes the hope that his Party is the Aaron's rod of all the Churches.
It even claims to afford hints for a rule for his life, at least so we gather from the Preface, where, alluding to "that group of freethinkers, including d'Alembert, Diderot, Holbach and Voltaire," the author tells us that they "first dared to follow the consequences of a mechanistic science incomplete as it then was to the rules of human conduct, and thereby laid the foundation of that spirit of tolerance, justice, and gentleness which was the hope of our civilisation until it was buried under the wave of homicidal emotion which has swept through the world."
Modern warfare and modern industry alike are carried on by technological processes subject to surveillance and direction by mechanical engineers, or perhaps rather experts in engineering science of the mechanistic kind. War is not now a matter of the stout heart and strong arm.
It is here that the materialistic philosophers, such as Professors Moore and Loeb, differ from the spiritualistic philosophers, such as Bergson, Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor Thompson, and others. Professor Moore has no sympathy with those narrow mechanistic views that see in the life processes "no problems save those of chemistry and physics."
So soon, or rather so far, as the common man comes to realise that these rights of ownership and investment uniformly work to his material detriment, at the same time that he has lost the "will to believe" in any argument that does not run in terms of the mechanistic logic, it is reasonable to expect that he will take a stand on this matter; and it is more than likely that the stand taken will be of an uncompromising kind, presumably something in the nature of the stand once taken by recalcitrant Englishmen in protest against the irresponsible rule of the Stuart sovereign.
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