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Updated: May 14, 2025
Hence, the relative position of all units at a given moment, whatever be their nature, strictly determines what their position will be in the succeeding moments, and this mechanistic succession goes on like a Juggernaut car with crushing unrelentlessness, giving rise to a rigid fatalism: "The moving finger writes; and having writ Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all thy tears wash out a Word of it."
It will take a very appreciable space of time even in the case of a populace so accessible to new habits of thought as the German people are by virtue of their slight percentage of illiteracy, the very large proportion engaged in those modern industries that constantly require some intelligent insight into mechanistic facts, the density of population and the adequate means of communication, and the extent to which the whole population is caught in the web of mechanically standardised processes that condition their daily life at every turn.
I fancy that the difficulty which an increasing number of persons find in accepting the mechanistic view of life, or evolution, the view which Herbert Spencer built into such a ponderous system of philosophy, and which such men as Huxley, Tyndall, Gifford, Haeckel, Verworn, and others, have upheld and illustrated, is temperamental rather than logical.
What must the result be, if it leave biological and psychological facts to positive science alone, as it has left, and rightly left, physical facts? It will accept a priori a mechanistic conception of all nature, a conception unreflected and even unconscious, the outcome of the material need. It will a priori accept the doctrine of the simple unity of knowledge and of the abstract unity of nature.
Does not Ray Lankester, the irate champion of the mechanistic view of life, say essentially the same thing when he calls man the great Insurgent in Nature's camp "crossing her courses, reversing her processes, and defeating her ends?" Life appears like the introduction of a new element or force or tendency into the cosmos.
But in no case has the discipline of this mechanistic technology yet wrought its perfect work or come to a definitive conclusion.
This contrast between the complexity of the organ and the unity of the function is what gives us pause. A mechanistic theory is one which means to show us the gradual building-up of the machine under the influence of external circumstances intervening either directly by action on the tissues or indirectly by the selection of better-adapted ones.
Now, suppose our eyes so made that they cannot help seeing in the work of the master a mosaic effect. Or suppose our intellect so made that it cannot explain the appearance of the figure on the canvas except as a work of mosaic. We should then be able to speak simply of a collection of little squares, and we should be under the mechanistic hypothesis.
It is one of the greatest difficulties in the way of the mechanistic and materialistic theories. But it must give some trouble to the parallelists too. We need not speak of the wonderful duplication of all existence which parallelism must establish, though it is difficult to evade the question how a natura sive deus could have come, so superfluously, to say the same thing twice over.
In the meantime, there is only one road which is clear the road of material progress, and whether its end lies in the new barbarism of a mechanistic state where the mental and physical faculties will decline in proportion to the means discovered for healing their ills, or whether it is merely a path where the privileged leaders must mark step for a while until the unprivileged masses catch up with them in material welfare, no one knows and few that are really competent care to inquire.
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