Sibylla : $b or, The revival of prophecy — John Shaqi
Sibylla : $b or, The revival of prophecyMace, C. A. (Cecil Alec)
Philosophy
Sibylla : $b or, The revival of prophecy
Mace, C. A. (Cecil Alec)
Civilization; Progress
We can readily grant at the outset all that the mechanists claim. In
fact, there is nothing, I think, unlikely in the suggestion that, so
far as mechanical invention is concerned, we are approaching the time
when all that is physically possible will be realized. The future
customer at Selfridges’ who inquires for a teleofactor in order to
smell the perfumes of Arabia will be told that the impossibility of
this has now been finally proved. For the rest of his desires, however,
he will be quite amply supplied. He will have perfect wireless concerts
and televisual cinemas; he will be conveyed by the morning aerial
Pullman from his villa-palace in Devonshire to his office in what was
once the Strand. To his Club or restaurant he will proceed by a moving
pavement, or in a bath-chair propelled by radiant power. His week-ends
may be spent in Samarkand or in tobogganing on Mount Everest. His wife,
too, will benefit by this universal progress. Her day’s work will be
done by 9 a.m. The turning of a tap or two will nourish the ectogenetic
child foretold by Mr Haldane, and the pressing of a button will put in
action the automatic cook. By wireless communication with Paris she
will choose a garment, to be delivered by an aerial messenger boy upon
his cycloplane. After luncheon she will, again by wireless, put herself
in visual and auditory contact with other members of the society to
which she belongs. It will probably be a society for the revival of
twentieth-century customs.
But, granting all this, the obvious question occurs. What will be
its effect upon human nature? Is it conceivable that the perfecting
of machinery could leave it unaffected, and will not inevitably
this inventive genius be turned upon man himself? Our future man of
business who, by improved modes of locomotion, spends his week-ends
in Tennessee, Kikuyu, or Zanzibar (according to his religious
predilections), will he enjoy only the advantages of mechanical
invention? Surely a perfected Pelmanism will enable him to learn three
native languages on the Friday’s journey out, and an improved process
of repression assist him to forget them on the Sunday evening’s
journey home.
This is not entirely idle speculation. Applications of science to the
control of the human mind have already begun. They started, perhaps, in
the crude and blundering experiments in Scientific Management. They are
groping towards more solid foundations in Industrial Psychology――the
philosophical significance of which has, up to the present, escaped the
attention it deserves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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