In short, the few victories which the ancients had won over nature were to them a cause of embarrassment rather than of enthusiasm; for they saw in them merely a proof of the perversity and foolhardiness of human pride. If a contemporary of Sophocles or Horace came back to the world, he would probably just at first be terrified by what he saw all round him, as by the spectacle of a gigantic and unheard-of madness. Machinery, which to us seems the most marvellous instrument of our energy and intelligence, appeared to the ancients a danger, an enemy, and almost a sacrilege: an attempt to rebel against the gods and their wishes. Consequently, they invented and adopted machines—and those but simple and primitive ones—only for use in war, especially for siege-work. The necessity of conquering made them forget to some extent their usual fears. So great a difference in thought and feeling, in a matter which to us seems of such vital importance, must arise from deep-seated causes. Why did the ancients invent and construct so few machines, and hold in such fear the few they had? Why did they wish the hand of man to be the principal and the most powerful among the instruments of production? Many attribute the inferiority of the ancients in this department to the comparatively undeveloped state of science. Vast and profound knowledge of science, they say, is required for the construction of modern machines. The ancients did not possess this knowledge; therefore, they conclude, they could not construct the machines. But, in this deduction there are two exaggerations. The services of science, especially in early times, to machines and their progress, are exaggerated; so also is the scientific ignorance of the ancients. Science has helped materially to perfect certain machines, but has actually invented scarcely one. Many of the marvellous machines which, at a giddy rate, multiply riches all round us, have been conceived for the first time in the minds of artisans, _contre-maîtres_, managers of factories, and other persons more expert in practice than rich in scientific lore. The founder of the great mechanical industry, Arkwright, who invented the cotton-spinning machine, was a barber. Watt, the inventor of the steam-engine, though perhaps a better-educated man than Arkwright, was not in any sense a great scientist. For the rest, whoever knows the history of machinery is aware that science did not begin to concern herself with machinery, or to inquire whether her studies might help inventors with useful suggestions, until the great mechanical industry had already invaded the world. Science, then, only followed a movement which had already begun, and did not give it the first impulse.