We have spoken of the eighteenth-century mind as living in a “clockwork” cosmos, and it is interesting to reflect that even this simplest form of mechanical contrivance was a thing quite unknown to the ancient world. Was the rhythmical mimicry of organic life, which is the characteristic of machinery, already having its unperceived effect on men’s minds and philosophies? The influences which go to make up the outlook of an age are sometimes seen working most powerfully—though beneath the surface—in the very minds which believe themselves to be combating that outlook most stubbornly. The closing years of the eighteenth century produced Paley’s famous watch, a popular cosmic allegory which, in proving the existence of a Creator, at the same time relegates all His activities to the remote past. But this is a subject which can be more usefully considered in the next chapter. Thither we must now turn in order to trace the further development of the eighteenth-century gentleman’s imaginative double life—his life in the order and reason of the moral and material universe and of “sensibility” in the little universe of himself—into two divergent directions. CHAPTER X MECHANISM _Automatic._ _Spring._ _Species._ _Cause._ _Agnostic._ _Unction._ _Spiritualism._ _Humanitarianism._ “The material universe is the complement of the intellect, and without the study of its laws reason would never have awoke to its higher forms of self-consciousness at all. It is the non-ego, through and by which the ego is endowed with self-discernment.”—TYNDALL: _Fragments of Science_. “Whatever else a child may be, in respect of this particular question [respiration], it is a complicated piece of mechanism, built up out of materials supplied by its mother; and in the course of such building-up, provided with a set of motors—the muscles. Each of these muscles contains a stock of substance capable of yielding energy under certain conditions, one of which is a change of state in the nerve fibres connected with it. The powder in a loaded gun is such another stock of substance capable of yielding energy in consequence of a change of state in the mechanism of the lock.... “The infant is launched into altogether new surroundings; and these operate through the mechanism of the nervous machinery, with the result that the potential energy of some of the work-stuff in the muscles which bring about inspiration is suddenly converted into actual energy; and this, operating through the mechanism of the respiratory apparatus, gives rise to an act of inspiration. As the bullet is propelled by the ‘going-off’ of the powder, so it might be said that the ribs are raised and the midriff depressed by the ‘going-off’ of certain portions of muscular work-stuff.”—HUXLEY: _Science and Morals_.