TWO:I am not aware that any one has defined what constitutes civil engineering, or mechanical engineering, as distinguished one from the other, nor is it assumed to fix any standard here [14] farther than to serve the purpose of explaining the sense in which the terms will be used; yet there seems to be a clear line of distinction, which, if it does not agree with popular use of the terms, at least seems to be furnished by the nature of the business itself. It will therefore be assumed that mechanical engineering relates to dynamic forces and works that involve machine motion, and comprehends the conditions of machine action, such as torsional, centrifugal, intermittent, and irregular strains in machinery, arising out of motion; the endurance of wearing surfaces, the constructive processes of machine-making and machine effect in the conversion of materialin short, agents for converting, transmitting, and applying power.Lige now loomed up in the distance, and the nearer I got, the more civilians I met. They all wore a white armlet, and walked timidly and nervously by the side of the road or street, starting at39 each thunder-clap of the guns. Near the entrance to the town a small crowd stood on one of the hills, looking at a flying-machine moving from fort to fort and over the city, obviously investigating the effect of the German siege-guns.
TWO:Steam-engines.The value of experimentation as such had, however, scarcely dawned on Bacon. His famous Prerogative In379stances are, in the main, a guide to simple observation, supplemented rather than replaced by direct interference with the phenomena under examination, comparable to that moderate use of the rack which he would have countenanced in criminal procedure. There was, perhaps, a deeper meaning in Harveys remark that Bacon wrote about Nature like a Lord Chancellor than the great physiologist himself suspected. To Bacon the statesman, science was something to be largely endowed out of the public treasury in the sure hope that it would far more than repay the expenditure incurred, by inventions of priceless advantage to human life. To Bacon the lawyer, Nature was a person in possession of important secrets to be wrested from her by employing every artifice of the spy, the detective, the cross-examiner, and the inquisitorial judge; to Bacon the courtier, she was a sovereign whose policy might be discovered, and, if need be, controlled, by paying judicious attention to her humours and caprices. And, for this very reason, he would feel drawn by a secret affinity to the Aristotelian dialectic, derived as it was through Socrates and Plato from the practice of the Athenian law-courts and the debates of the Athenian assembly. No doubt the Topics was intended primarily for a manual of debate rather than of scientific enquiry; and the English Chancellor showed true philosophic genius in his attempt to utilise it for the latter purpose. Nevertheless the adaptation proved a mistake. It was not without good grounds that the Socratic dialectic had been reserved exclusively by its great founder, and almost exclusively by his successors, for those human interests from the discussion of which it was first derived. And the discoverers, who in Bacons own lifetime were laying the foundations of physical science, employed a method totally different from his, because they started with a totally different conception of the universe. To them it was not a living whole, a Form of Forms, but a sum of forces to be analysed, isolated, and recombined, in fact or in idea, with a sublime disregard380 for the conditions under which they were presented to ordinary experience. That very extension of human power anticipated by Bacon came in a manner of which he had never dreamed. It was gained by studying, not the Forms to which he attached so much importance, but the modes of motion which he had relegated to a subordinate place in his classification of natural causes.543
TWO:Tempering may be called a mystery of the smith-shop; this operation has that attraction which characterises every process that is mysterious, especially such as are connected with, or belong to mechanical manipulation. A strange and perhaps fortunate habit of the mind is to be greatly interested in what is not well understood, and to disregard what is capable of plain demonstration.Again, the new position occupied by Mind as an intermediary between the world of reality and the world of appearance, tended more and more to obliterate or confuse the demarcations by which they had hitherto been separated. The most general headings under which it was usual to contrast them were, the One and the Many, Being and Nothing, the Same and the Different, Rest and Motion. Parmenides employed the one set of terms to describe his Absolute, and the other to describe the objects of vulgar belief. They also served respectively to designate the wise and the ignorant, the dialectician and the sophist, the knowledge of gods and the opinions of men; besides offering points of contact with the antithetical couples of Pythagoreanism. But Plato gradually found that the nature of Mind could not be understood without taking both points of view into account. Unity and plurality, sameness and difference, equally entered into its composition; although undoubtedly belonging to the sphere of reality, it was self264-moved and the cause of all motion in other things. The dialectic or classificatory method, with its progressive series of differentiations and assimilations, also involved a continual use of categories which were held to be mutually exclusive. And on proceeding to an examination of the summa genera, the highest and most abstract ideas which it had been sought to distinguish by their absolute purity and simplicity from the shifting chaos of sensible phenomena, Plato discovered that even these were reduced to a maze of confusion and contradiction by a sincere application of the cross-examining elenchus. For example, to predicate being of the One was to mix it up with a heterogeneous idea and let in the very plurality which it denied. To distinguish them was to predicate difference of both, and thus open the door to fresh embarrassments.
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