acter, bo to speak, is transfused into the product, and to whose workings the rest of the complex of causes are related only as subsidiary or conditioning circumstances. To the technologist the procesH comes necessarily to count, not simply as the iuteiv val of functioning of an initial efficient cause, but aa the substantial fact that engages his attention. He learns to think in terms of the process, rather than in terms of a productive cause and a product between which the process intervenes in such a manner as to aSord a transition from one to the other. The process is always complex ; always a delicately balanced interplay of forces that work blindly, insensibly, heedlessly ; in which any appreciable deviation may forthwith count in a cumulative manner, the further consequences of which stand in no organic relation to the purpose for which the procesa has been set going. The prime efficient cause falls, relatively, into the background and yields precedence to the process as the point of technological interest.
This machine technology, with its accompanying discipline in mechanical adaptations and objectlessons, came on gradually and rose to a dominating place in the cultural environment during the closing years of the eighteenth and the course of the nineteenth century ; and as fast as men learned to think in terms of technological process, they went on at an Mcelerated pace in the further invention of mechani-
CIVILIZATION AUD THE MACHINE PROCESS 369
cal processes, so that from that time the progress of inventions has been of a cumulative character and has cumulatively heightened the