' technology apparent, but also in the scope and
' The cutluraJ era of Natural Rights, NatnnI Liberty, aod Natural Hellglon reduced God to the rftnk of » " Great Artificer," and the mnchlne technology ia, in turn, reiegatmg Htm to that fringe of minor etnploymentB and those oatlying indoatrial ragioiu to which the huidlcraftamen have been retlrvd.
CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 361
method of that scientific knowledge that has had the vogue since the advent of the machine indus- 1 try. Scientific inquiry is directed to a different end and carried out under the guidance of a different range of principles or preconceptions in the modern industrial communities than in earlier days or in cultxiral centres lying outside the machine's dominion. Modem science is singleminded in its pursuit of impersonal relations of causal sequence in the phenomena with which it is occupied.
The line of descent of this matter-of-fact modem science is essentially British, as is that of the machine technology and of the characteristically modern civil and political institutions. It is true, beginnings of the modem scientific movement were made in Italy in the days of the Renaissance, and Central Europe had its share in the enlightenment ; but these early modern risings of the scientific spirit presently ran into the sand, when war, politics, and religion reasserted their sway in the south of Europe. Similar tentative stirrings of matter-of-fact thought were had in Spain and Prance before and during the early phases of the state-making era ; but here, again, war and politics rendered these onsets nearly nugatory, so that the intellectual output was more speculation than science. In the Low Countries something similar holds true, with a larger qualification. The Brit-