of the incandescent gases in the open hearth. It is from such facts so construed that modern technology is made up, and it is by such channels that the sense of workmanship has gone to the making of it. So the question recurs, How has it come about that this pecuniary culture--with its institutions drawn in terms of differential advantage and moved by sentiments that converge on emulative gain and the invidiously conspicuous waste of goods--has yet furthered the growth of such a technology, even permissively? In its direct incidence, the discipline of this pecuniary culture is doubtless inimical to any advance in workmanlike insight or any matter-of-fact apprehension and use of objective phenomena. It is a civilisation whose substantial core is of a subjective kind, in the narrowly subjective, personal, individualistic sense given by the self-regarding sentiments of emulous rivalry.[113] But when all is said it is after all a peaceable culture, on the whole; and indeed the rules of the business game of profit and loss, forfeit and sequestration, require it to be so. It has at least that much, and perhaps much else, in common with the great technological era of the north-European neolithic age. The discipline to which its peoples are subject may be exacting enough, and its exactions may run to worldly wisdom rather than to matter-of-fact; but its invidious distinctions run in terms of price, that is to say in terms of an objective, impersonal money unit, in the last resort a metallic weight; and the traffic of daily life under this price system affords an unremitting exercise in the exact science of making change, large and small. Even the daydreams of the pecuniary day-dreamer take shape as a calculus of profit and loss computed in standard units of an impersonal magnitude, even though the magnitude of these standard units may on analysis prove to be of a largely putative character. The imputation under the price system is of an impersonal kind. In the current apprehension of the pecuniary devotee these magnitudes are wholly objective, so that in effect the training that comes of busying himself with them is after all a training in the accurate appreciation of brute fact. At the same time, the instinct of workmanship, being not an acquired trait, has not been got rid of by disuse; and when the occasion offers, under the relatively tranquil conditions of this peaceable or quasi-peaceable pecuniary régime, the ancient proclivity asserts itself in its ancient force, uneager and asthenic perhaps, but pervasive and resilient. And when this instinct works out through the Bœotic genius of the north-European hybrid there is a good chance that the outcome of such observation and reflection will fall into terms of matter-of-fact, of such close-shorn naïveté, indeed, as to afford very passable material for the material sciences and the machine technology.