The traditions of the handicraft technology lasted over as a commonplace habit of thought in science long after that technology had ceased to be the decisive element in the industrial situation; while a new technology, with its inculcation of new habits of thought, new preconceptions, gradually made its way among the remnants of the old, altering them, blending with them, and little by little superseding them. The new technological departure, which made its first great epoch in the so-called industrial revolution, in the technological ascendancy of the machine-process, brought a new and characteristic discipline into the cultural situation. The beginnings of the machine-era lie far back, no doubt; but it is only of late, during the past century at the most, that the machine-process can be said to have come into the dominant place in the technological scheme; and it is only later still that its discipline has, even in great part, remodeled the current preconceptions as to the substantial nature of what goes on in the current of phenomena whose changes excite the scientific curiosity. It is only relatively very lately, whether in technological work or in scientific inquiry, that men have fallen into the habit of thinking in terms of process rather than in terms of the workmanlike efficiency of a given cause working to a given effect. These machine-made preconceptions of modern science, being habits of thought induced by the machine technology in industry and in daily life, have of course first and most consistently affected the character of those sciences whose subject matter lies nearest to the technological field of the machine-process; and in these material sciences the shifting to the machine-made point of view has been relatively very consistent, giving a highly impersonal interpretation of phenomena in terms of consecutive change, and leaving little of the ancient preconceptions of differential reality or creative causation. In such a science as physics or chemistry, _e.g._, we are threatened with the disappearance or dissipation of all stable and efficient substances; their place being supplied, or their phenomena being theoretically explained, by appeal to unremitting processes of inconceivably high-pitched consecutive change.