Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of DiscussionsSpencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
Perhaps the clearest comprehension of the interconnected growth of the
sciences may be obtained by contemplating that of the arts, to which it is
strictly analogous, and with which it is inseparably bound up. Most
intelligent persons must have been, at one time or other, struck with the
vast array of antecedents pre-supposed by one of our processes of
manufacture. Let him trace the production of a printed cotton, and consider
all that is implied by it. There are the many successive improvements
through which the power-looms reached their present perfection; there is
the steam-engine that drives them, having its long history from Papin
downwards; there are the lathes in which its cylinder was bored, and the
string of ancestral lathes from which those lathes proceeded; there is the
steam-hammer under which its crank shaft was welded; there are the
puddling-furnaces, the blast-furnaces, the coal-mines and the iron-mines
needful for producing the raw material; there are the slowly improved
appliances by which the factory was built, and lighted, and ventilated;
there are the printing engine, and the die house, and the colour laboratory
with its stock of materials from all parts of the world, implying
cochineal-culture, logwood-cutting, indigo-growing; there are the
implements used by the producers of cotton, the gins by which it is
cleaned, the elaborate machines by which it is spun: there are the vessels
in which cotton is imported, with the building-slips, the rope-yards, the
sail-cloth factories, the anchor-forges, needful for making them; and
besides all these directly necessary antecedents, each of them involving
many others, there are the institutions which have developed the requisite
intelligence, the printing and publishing arrangements which have spread
the necessary information, the social organization which has rendered
possible such a complex co-operation of agencies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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