Thomas Carlyle, Excerpts from "Signs of the
Times" (1829)
How
often have we heard, for the last fifty years, that the country
was wrecked, and fast sinking; whereas, up to this date, the
country is entire and afloat. The "State in Danger" is a condition
of things, which we have witnessed a hundred times; and as for the
Church, it has seldom been out of "danger" since we can remember
it.
All men are aware that the present is a crisis of this sort; and
why it has become so. The repeal of the Test Acts, and then of the
Catholic disabilities, has struck many of their admirers with an
indescribable astonishment. Those things seemed fixed and
immovable; deep as the foundations of the world; and lo, in a
moment they have vanished, and their place knows them no more! Our
worthy friends mistook the slumbering Leviathan for an island;
often as they had been assured, that Intolerance was, and could be
nothing but a Monster; and so, mooring under the lee, they had
anchored comfortably in his scaly rind, thinking to take good
cheer; as for some space they did. But now their Leviathan has
suddenly dived under; and they can no longer be fastened in the
stream of time; but must drift forward on it, even like the rest
of the world: no very appalling fate, we think, could they but
understand it; which, however, they will not yet, for a season.
Their little island is gone; sunk deep amid confused eddies; and
what is left worth caring for in the universe? What is it to them
that the great continents of the earth are still standing; and the
polestar and all our loadstars ' in the heavens, still shining and
eternal? Their cherished little haven is gone, and they will not
be comforted And therefore, day after day, in all manner of
periodical or perennial publications, the most lugubrious
predictions are sent forth. The King has virtually abdicated; the
Church is a widow, without jointure; public principle is gone;
private honesty is going; society, in short, is fast falling in
pieces; and a time of unmixed evil is come on us.
....
Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single
epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical,
Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others,
the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward
and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole
undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of
adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand;
all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest
operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning
abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion
are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living
artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier,
inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver,
and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls
his sail, and lays down his oar; and bids a strong,
unwearied servant, on vaporous wings, bear him through the waters.
Men have crossed oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-king has
visited the fabulous East; and the genius of the Cape were there
any Camoens now to sing it, has again been alarmed, and with far
stranger thunders than Gamas. There is no end to machinery. Even
the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire-horse
invoked in his stead. Nay, we have an artist that hatches chickens
by steam; the very brood-hen is to be superseded! For all earthly,
and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic
furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into
magnetic sleep. We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth
highways; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by
our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded
with spoils.
What wonderful accessions have thus been made, and are still
making, to the physical power of mankind; how much better fed,
clothed, lodged and, in all outward respects, accommodated men now
are, or might be, by a given quantity of labour, is a grateful
reflection which forces itself on every one. What changes, too,
this addition of power is introducing into the Social System; how
wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered
itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old
relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the
poor, will be a question for Political Economists, and a much more
complex and important one than any they have yet engaged with.
But leaving these matters for the present, let us observe how the
mechanical genius of our time has diffused itself into quite other
provinces. Not the external and physical alone is now managed by
machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing
follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished
by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised
implements, its preestablished apparatus; it is not done by hand,
but by machinery. Thus we have machines for Education: Lancastrian
machines; Hamiltonian machines; monitors, maps and emblems.
Instruction, that mysterious communing of Wisdom with Ignorance,
is no longer an indefinable tentative process, requiring a study
of individual aptitudes, and a perpetual variation of means and
methods, to attain the same end; but a secure, universal,
straightforward business, to be conducted in the gross, by proper
mechanism, with such intellect as comes to hand. Then, we have
Religious machines, of all imaginable varieties; the
Bible-Society, professing a far higher and heavenly structure, is
found, on inquiry, to be altogether an earthly contrivance:
supported by collection of moneys, by fomenting of vanities, by
puffing, intrigue and chicane; a machine for converting the
Heathen. It is the same in all other departments. Has any man, or
any society of men, a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to
do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural
organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees,
issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or
borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it. Without
machinery, they were hopeless, helpless; a colony of Hindoo
weavers squatting in the heart of Lancashire. Mark, too, how every
machine must have its moving power, in some of the great currents
of society; every little sect among us, Unitarians, Utilitarians,
Anabaptists, Phrenologists, must have its Periodical, its monthly
or quarterly Magazine;-- hanging out, like its windmill, into the
popularis aura, to grind meal for the society.
With individuals, in like manner, natural strength avails little.
No individual now hopes to accomplish the poorest enterprise
single-handed and without mechanical aids; he must make interest
with some existing corporation, and till his field with their
oxen. In these days, more emphatically than ever, "to live,
signifies to unite with a party, or to make one." Philosophy,
Science, Art, Literature, all depend on machinery. No Newton, by
silent meditation, now discovers the system of the world from the
falling of an apple; but some quite other than Newton stands in
his Museum, his Scientific Institution, and behind whole batteries
of retorts, digesters, and galvanic piles imperatively
"interrogates Nature," who however, shows no haste to answer. In
defect of Raphaels, and Angelos, and Mozarts, we have Royal
Academies of Painting, Sculpture, Music; whereby the languishing
spirits of Art may be strengthened, as by the more generous diet
of a Public Kitchen. Literature, too, has its Paternoster-row
mechanism, its Trade-dinners, its Editorial conclaves, and huge
subterranean, puffing bellows; so that books are not only printed,
but, in a great measure, written and sold, by machinery. National
culture, spiritual benefit of all sorts, is under the same
management. No Queen Christina, in these times, needs to send for
her Descartes; no King Frederick for his Voltaire, and painfully
nourish him with pensions and flattery: any sovereign of taste,
who wishes to enlighten his people, has only to impose a new tax,
and with the proceeds establish Philosophic Institutes. Hence the
Royal and Imperial Societies, the Bibliothèques, Glyptothèques,
Technothèques, which front us in all capital cities; like so many
well-finished hives, to which it is expected the stray agencies of
Wisdom will swarm of their own accord, and hive and make honey. In
like manner, among ourselves, when it is thought that religion is
declining, we have only to vote half-amillion's worth of bricks
and mortar, and build new churches. In Ireland it seems they have
gone still farther, having actually established a "Penny-a-week
Purgatory-Society"! Thus does the Genius of Mechanism stand by to
help us in all difficulties and emergencies, and with his iron
back bears all our burdens.
These things, which we state lightly enough here, are yet of deep
import, and indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of
existence. For the same habit regulates not our modes of action
alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown
mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have
lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any
kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations
and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism
of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole
efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a
mechanical character.
We may trace this tendency in all the great manifestations of our
time; in its intellectual aspect, the studies it most favours and
its manner of conducting them; in its practical aspects, its
politics, arts, religion, morals; in the whole sources, and
throughout the whole currents, of its spiritual, no less than its
material activity.
....
Nowhere, for example, is the deep, almost exclusive faith we have
in Mechanism more visible than in the Politics of this time. Civil
government does by its nature include much that is mechanical, and
must be treated accordingly. We term it indeed, in ordinary
language, the Machine of Society, and talk of it as the grand
working wheel from which all private machines must derive, or to
which they must adapt, their movements. Considered merely as a
metaphor, all this is well enough; but here, as in so many other
cases, the "foam hardens itself into a shell," and the shadow we
have wantonly evoked stands terrible before us and will not depart
at our bidding. Government includes much also that is not
mechanical, and cannot be treated mechanically; of which latter
truth, as appears to us, the political speculations and exertions
of our time are taking less and less cognisance.
Nay, in the very outset, we might note the mighty interest taken
in mere political arrangements, as itself the sign of a mechanical
age. The whole discontent of Europe takes this direction. The
deep, strong cry of all civilised nations, — a cry which, every
one now sees, must and will be answered, is: Give us a reform of
Government! A good structure of legislation, a proper check upon
the executive, a wise arrangement of the judiciary, is all that is
wanting for human happiness. The Philosopher of this age is not a
Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the
necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth
that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not
on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De
Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this, —
that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances;
nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself
the creature and- consequence of these. Were the laws, the
government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would
care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or
implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men
differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all.
Equally mechanical, and of equal simplicity, are the methods
proposed by both parties for completing or securing this
all-sufficient perfection of arrangement. It is no longer the
moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our
concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as
regulated by public laws. Thus is the Body-politic more than ever
worshipped and tendered; but the Soul-politic less than ever. Love
of country, in any high or generous sense, in any other than an
almost animal sense, or mere habit, has little importance attached
to it in such reforms, or in the opposition shown them. Men are to
be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good
balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for
self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties
it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a
"taxing-machine "; to the contented, a "machine for securing
property." Its duties and its faults are not those of a father,
but of an active parish-constable.
Thus it is by the mere condition of the machine, by preserving it
untouched, or else by reconstructing it, and oiling it anew, that
man's salvation as a social being is to be ensured and
indefinitely promoted. Contrive the fabric of law aright, and
without farther effort on your part, that divine spirit of
Freedom, which all hearts venerate and long for, will of herself
come to inhabit it; and under her healing wings every noxious
influence will wither, every good and salutary one more and more
expand. Nay, so devoted are we to this principle, and at the same
time so curiously mechanical, that a new trade, specially grounded
on it, has arisen among us, under the name of "Codification," or
codemaking in the abstract; whereby any people, for a reasonable
consideration, may be accommodated with a patent code; — more
easily than curious individuals with patent breeches, for the
people does not need to be measured first.
....
In fact, if we look deeper, we shall find that this faith in
Mechanism has now struck its roots down into man's most intimate,
primary sources of conviction; and is thence sending up, over his
whole life and activity, innumerable stems, — fruitbearing and
poison-bearing. The truth is, men have lost their belief in the
Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible;
or, to speak it in other words: This is not a Religious age. Only
the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and
spiritual, is important to us. The infinite, absolute character of
Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer
a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the
Profitable. Worship, indeed, in any sense, is not recognised among
us, or is mechanically explained into Fear of pain, or Hope of
pleasure. Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external
Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are
Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we
are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to
conquer Heaven also.
The strong Mechanical character, so visible in the spiritual
pursuits and methods of this age, may be traced much farther into
the condition and prevailing disposition of our spiritual nature
itself. Consider, for example, the general fashion of Intellect in
this era. Intellect, the power man has of knowing and believing,
is now nearly synonymous with Logic, or the mere power of
arranging and communicating. Its implement is not Meditation, but
Argument. "Cause and effect" is almost the only category under
which we look at, and work with, all Nature. Our first question
with regard to any object is not, What is it? but, How is it? We
are no longer instinctively driven to apprehend, and lay to heart,
what is Good and Lovely, but rather to inquire, as onlookers, how
it is produced, whence it comes, whither it goes. Our favourite
Philosophers have no love and no hatred; they stand among us not
to do, nor to create anything, but as a sort of Logic mills, to
grind out the true causes and effects of all that is done and
created. To the eye of a Smith, a Hume or a Constant, all is well
that works quietly. An Order of Ignatius Loyola, a Presbyterianism
of John Knox, a Wickliffe or a Henry the Eighth, are simply so
many mechanical phenomena, caused or causing.
Source:
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/signs1.html