Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 11, 2025
A few men, however, standing on the mountain ranges of human observation, saw the future more clearly than did the mass. Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Max Nordau, in the nineteenth century, and, in our time, Ferrero, all pointed out the inevitable dangers of the excessive mechanization of human society. The prophecies were unhappily as little heeded as those of Cassandra.
Of course this does not imply that at one period we foolishly believed consciousness to be an important guide, but subsequently becoming wiser, discarded its aid. On the contrary, the mechanization of second nature is simply a mode of extending the influence of consciousness more widely. The conclusions of our early lectures were sound.
<1> J.B. Miner, "Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms," Psychol. Rev., Mon. Closely connected with these facts, perhaps only a somewhat different aspect of them, is the phenomenon of motor mechanization. Any movement repeated tends to become a circular reaction, as it is called; that is, the end of one repetition serves as a cue for the beginning of the next.
When men so diverse as Tagore the Indian sage and Rathenau the German Trust magnate tell us that the disease from which we are suffering is 'mechanization', and that our crying need is for greater simplicity, it seems safe to predict that Plato would not reject the possibility of providing a 'good life' for the modern man in a world divested of most of the rattling and tinkling paraphernalia of which the nineteenth century so plumed itself as the inventor.
These experiences of the scientists concerning the influences of training, the mechanization of repetition, and the automatization of movements have been thoroughly discussed by a brilliant political economist as an explanation of certain industrial facts, but they have not yet practically influenced life in the factory.
Only one thing was overlooked. The mechanization of economics had become a common possession for everybody. Starting from this and with the methods and experiences attached to it, it was possible also for other countries, if necessary, to mechanize their politics or, as we say now, to militarize them.
He wished the programme to include, among other aims, the further mechanization of production, particularly the mechanization of all unpleasant and dirty processes, improved sanitary inspection, shortening of the working day in employments harmful to health, forbidding women with child to do any but very light work, and none at all for eight weeks before giving birth and for eight weeks afterwards, forbidding overtime, and so on.
With short interruptions this Prusso-central point of view was maintained until the middle of the World-War; and not quite unjustly, for Prussia remained in every respect ahead of other powers in the department of mechanization. For a hundred years the Prussian principles had a monopoly of success; elsewhere they were scarcely understood and much less imitated. Then came Napoleon.
Hence the history of the Spirit and, incidentally, the history of all churches exhibits to us a series of strong movements towards completed life, inspired by vigorous and transcendent personalities; thwarted by the common indolence and tendency to mechanization, but perpetually renewed.
The two systems of mechanization were at their zenith, and the other countries looked, in political affairs, as slovenly as ever.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking