Technique is as old as free-moving life itself. Only the plant--so far as we can see into Nature--is the mere theatre of technical processes. The animal, in that it moves, has a technique of movement so that it may nourish and protect itself.

The original relation between a waking-microcosm and its macrocosm--“Nature”--consists in a touch through the senses[921] which rises from mere _sense-impressions_ to sense-_judgment_, so that already it works critically (that is, separatingly) or, what comes to the same thing, _causal-analytically_.[922] The stock of what has been determined then is enlarged into a system, as complete as may be, of the most primary experiences--identifying marks[923]--a spontaneous method by which one is enabled to feel at home in one’s world; in the case of many animals this has led to an amazing richness of experience that no human science has transcended. But the primary waking-being is always an _active_ one, remote from mere theory of all sorts, and thus it is in the minor technique of everyday life, and upon things _in so far as they are dead_,[924] that these experiences are involuntarily acquired. This is the difference between Cult and Myth,[925] for at this level there is no boundary line between religion and the profane--all waking-consciousness _is_ religion.

The decisive turn in the history of the higher life occurs when the _determination_ of Nature (in order to be guided by it) changes into a _fixation_--that is, a purposed alteration of Nature. With this, technique becomes more or less sovereign and the instinctive prime-experience changes into a definitely “conscious” prime-_knowing_. Thought has emancipated itself from sensation. It is the _language of words_ that brings about this epochal change. The liberation of speech from speaking[926] gives rise to a stock of signs for communication-speech which are much more than identification-marks--they are _names_ bound up with a sense of meaning, whereby man has the secret of numina (deities, nature-forces) in his power, and _number_ (formulæ, simple laws), whereby the inner form of the actual is abstracted form the accidental-sensuous.[927]

With that, the system of identification-marks develops into a theory, a _picture_ which detaches itself from the technique of the day[928]--whether this be a day of high-level Civilized technics or a day of simplest beginnings--by way of _abstraction_, as a piece of waking-consciousness uncommitted to activity. One “knows” what one wants, but much must have happened for one to have that knowledge, and we must make no mistake as to its character. By numerical experience man is enabled to switch the secret on and off, but he has not discovered it. The figure of the modern sorcerer--a switchboard with levers and labels at which the workman calls mighty effects into play by the pressure of a finger without possessing the slightest notion of their essence--is only the symbol of human technique in general. The picture of the light-world around us--in so far as we have developed it critically, analytically, as theory, as picture--is nothing but a switchboard of the kind, on which particular things are so labelled that by (so to say) pressing the appropriate button particular effects follow with certainty. The secret itself remains none the less oppressive on that account.[929] But through this technique the waking-consciousness does, all the same, intervene masterfully in the fact-world. Life _makes use_ of thought as an “open sesame,” and at the peak of many a Civilization, in its great cities, there arrives finally the moment when technical critique becomes tired of being life’s servant and makes itself tyrant. The Western Culture is even now experiencing an orgy of this unbridled thought, and on a tragic scale.

Man has listened-in to the march of Nature and made notes of its indices. He begins to imitate it by means and methods that utilize the laws of the cosmic pulse. He is emboldened to play the part of God, and it is easy to understand how the earliest preparers and experts of these artificial things--for it was here that art came to be, _as counter-concept to nature_--and how in particular the guardians of the smith’s art, appeared to those around them as something uncanny and were regarded with awe or horror as the case might be. The stock of such discoveries grew and grew. Often they were made and forgotten and made again, were imitated, shunned, improved. But in the end they constituted for whole continents a store of _self-evident_ means--fire, metal-working, instruments, arms, ploughs, boats, houses, animal-taming, and husbandry. Above all, the metals, to whose site in the earth primitive man is led by some uncannily mystical trait in him. Immemoriably old trade-routes lead to ore-deposits that are kept secret, through the life of the settled countryside and over frequented seas, and along these, later, travel cults and ornaments and persistent legends of islands of tin and lands of gold. The primary trade of all is the metal trade, and with it the economics of production and of work are joined intrusively by a third--alien, venturesome, free-ranging over the lands.

On this foundation, now, arises the technique of the higher Cultures, expressive in quality and colour and passion of the whole soul of these major entities. It need hardly be said that Classical man, who felt himself and his environment alike Euclidean, set himself _a priori_ in hostile opposition to the very idea of technique. If by “Classical” technique we mean something that (along with the rest that we comprehend in the adjective) rose with determined effort above the universal dead perfection of the Mycenæan age, then there was no Classical technique.[930] Its triremes were glorified row-boats, its catapults and onagers mere substitutes for arms and fists--not to be named in the same breath with the war-engines of Assyria and China--and as for Hero and his like, it was flukes and not discoveries that they achieved. They lacked the inner weight, the fatedness of their moment, the deep necessity. Here and there men played with data (and why not?) that probably came from the East, but no one devoted serious attention to them and, above all, no one made a real effort to introduce them into the ensemble-picture of life.

Very different is the Faustian technics, which with all its passion of the third dimension, and from earliest Gothic days, thrusts itself upon Nature, with the firm resolve to _be its master_. Here, and only here, is the connexion of insight and utilization a matter of course.[931] Theory is working hypothesis[932] from the outset. The Classical investigator “contemplated” like Aristotle’s deity, the Arabian sought as alchemist for magical means (such as the Philosophers’ Stone) whereby to possess himself of Nature’s treasures _without effort_,[933] but the Western strives to _direct_ the world according to his will.

The Faustian inventor and discoverer is a unique type. The primitive force of his will, the brilliance of his visions, the steely energy of his practical ponderings, must appear queer and incomprehensible to anyone at the standpoint of another Culture, but for us they are in the blood. Our whole Culture has a discoverer’s soul. To _dis_-cover that which is not seen, to draw it into the light-world of the inner eye so as to master it--that was its stubborn passion from the first days on. All its great inventions slowly ripened in the deeps, to emerge at last with the necessity of a Destiny. All of them were very nearly approached by the high-hearted, happy research of the early Gothic monks.[934] Here, if anywhere, the religious origins of all technical thought are manifested.[935] These meditative discoverers in their cells, who with prayers and fastings _wrung_ God’s secret out of him, felt that they were _serving_ God thereby. Here is the Faust-figure, the grand symbol of a true discovering Culture. The _Scientia experimentalis_, as Roger Bacon was the first to call nature-research, the _insistent_ questioning of Nature with levers and screws, began that of which the issue lies under our eyes as a countryside sprouting factory-chimneys and conveyor-towers. But for all of them, too, there was the truly Faustian danger of the Devil’s having a hand in the game,[936] the risk that he was leading them in spirit to that mountain on which he promises all the power of the earth. This is the significance of the _perpetuum mobile_ dreamed of by those strange Dominicans like Petrus Peregrinus, which would wrest the almightiness from God. Again and again they succumbed to this ambition; they forced this secret out of God in order themselves to be God. They listened for the laws of the cosmic pulse in order to overpower it. And so they created the _idea of the machine_ as a small cosmos obeying the will of man alone. But with that they overpassed the slender border-line whereat the reverent piety of others saw the beginning of sin, and on it, from Roger Bacon to Giordano Bruno, they came to grief. Ever and ever again, true belief has regarded the machine as of the Devil.

The passion of discovery declares itself as early as the Gothic architecture--compare with this the deliberate form-poverty of the Doric!--and is manifest throughout our music. Book-printing appeared, and the long-range weapon.[937] On the heels of Columbus and Copernicus come the telescope, the microscope, the chemical elements, and lastly the immense technological corpus of the early Baroque.

Then followed, however, simultaneously with Rationalism, the discovery of the steam-engine, which upset everything and transformed economic life from the foundations up. Till then nature had rendered services, but now she was tied to the yoke as _a slave_, and her work was as though in contempt measured by a standard of horse-power. We advanced from the muscle-force of the Negro, which was set to work in organized routines, to the organic reserves of the Earth’s crust, where the life-forces of millennia lay stored as coal; and to-day we cast our eyes on inorganic nature, where water-forces are already being brought in to supplement coal. As the horse-powers run to millions and milliards, the numbers of the population increase and increase, on a scale that no other Culture ever thought possible. This growth is a _product of the Machine_, which insists on being used and directed, and to that end centuples the forces of each individual. For the sake of the machine, human life becomes precious. _Work_ becomes the great word of ethical thinking; in the eighteenth century it loses its derogatory implication in all languages. The machine works and forces the man to co-operate. The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it.

And what now develops, in the space of hardly a century, is a drama of such greatness that the men of a future Culture, with other soul and other passions, will hardly be able to resist the conviction that “in those days” nature herself was tottering. The politics stride over cities and peoples; even the economics, deeply as they bite into the destinies of the plant and animal worlds, merely touch the fringe of life and efface themselves. But this technique will leave traces of its heyday behind it when all else is lost and forgotten. For this Faustian passion has altered the Face of the Earth.

This is the outward- and upward-straining life-feeling--true descendant, therefore, of the Gothic--as expressed in Goethe’s Faust monologue when the steam-engine was yet young. The intoxicated soul wills to fly above space and Time. An ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body, and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars. That which the glowing and soaring inwardness of St. Bernard sought at the beginning, that which Grünewald and Rembrandt conceived in their backgrounds, and Beethoven in the trans-earthly tones of his last quartets, comes back now in the intellectual intoxication of the inventions that crowd one upon another. Hence the fantastic traffic that crosses the continents in a few days, that puts itself across oceans in floating cities, that bores through mountains, rushes about in subterranean labyrinths, uses the steam-engine till its last possibilities have been exhausted, and then passes on to the gas-engine, and finally raises itself above the roads and railways and flies in the air; hence it is that the spoken word is sent in one moment over all the oceans; hence comes the ambition to break all records and beat all dimensions, to build giant halls for giant machines, vast ships and bridge-spans, buildings that deliriously scrape the clouds, fabulous forces pressed together to a focus to obey the hand of a child, stamping and quivering and droning works of steel and glass in which tiny man moves as unlimited monarch and, at the last, feels nature as beneath him.

And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric. They weave the earth over with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever more and more immaterial, ever less noisy. The wheels, rollers, and levers are vocal no more. All that matters withdraws itself into the interior. Man has felt the machine to be devilish, and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience is set in motion, silent and irresistible.