CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 311
The machine process gives no insight into questions of good and evil, merit and demerit, except in point of material causation, nor into the foundations or the constraining force of law and order, except such mechanically enforced law and order H8 may be stated in terms of pressure, temperature, velocity, tensile strength, etc.' The machine technology takes no cognizance of conventionally established rules of precedence ; it knows neither manners nor breeding and can make no use of any of the attributes of worth. Its scheme of knowledge and of inference is based on the laws of material causation, not on those of immemorial custom, authenticity, or authoritative enactment. Its metaphysical basis is the law of cause and effect, which in the thinking of its adepts has displaced even the law of sufficient reason.'
The range of conventional truths, or of institutional legacies, which it traverses is very comprehensive, being, indeed, all-inclusive. It is but little more in accord with the newer, eighteenthcentury conventional truths of natiu'al rights,
'Such eipreaaiona aa "good and ill," "merit and demerit," "law and order," when ^plied to technological facts or to the outcome of material science, are evidently only metapboiical eipreadons, borrowed from older usage and serviceable only an flguree of speech.
' Tarde, Ptj/clmlogic Economiqur, vol. I. pp. 122-131, offers acharacterliatioD of the psychology of modern work, contrasting, among other things, the work of the machine workman with that ol the handicraftsman In reBpectofiupflycbological requirements and eflecls. It may be taken as a temperate formulation of the current commonplaces on this topic, and seems to be fairly wide of the mark.