46 THE WORLD MACHINE 



by link builds up that corselet of ordered knowledge we call 

 science ? Consider his lowly beginnings ; think how handi- 

 capped man has been, how he has gone wrong, lost the way, 

 stumbled, been led astray, in his long endeavour " to strike 

 out a pathway toward the light " ! 



Think of his tools ; he has eyes to see with, hands to feel ; 

 sound, taste, and smell are of little use. Measures of the eye 

 do not turn out well, so he learns to mark off his fields in lengths 

 of his feet or his stride ; distances are a day's march. His 

 eyes will see but a little way, and will show only objects com- 

 paratively immense ; it is centuries before he hits on spectacles, 

 and with these contrives the fernrohre, the " distance- tubes " 

 of Hans Lippershey, of Zacharias Jensen, and the microscope 

 as well. 



His two hands are clumsy, and do not readily distinguish 

 between two weights of silver or gold he devises the balance ; 

 his sense of time is vague he invents a time-machine, and 

 the Roman slaves who run to the Forum to learn the noon hour 

 give way to the clock. Patiently he ekes out the meagre 

 endowments of nature, until at last amid the wilderness he 

 has a workshop. And all the while he reflects, compares, " in- 

 tends his mind." He ponders the changing length of nights 

 and days, the order of the seasons, the position of the sun, the 

 growth of the crops ; he notes the course of the planets, of the 

 moon, the nightly wheeling of the firmament round its central 

 pivot star ; through the whole concourse and spectacle subtly 

 he begins to trace a connection, a binding chain ; he perceives 

 that in one way or another they are all linked together ; he rises 

 at last to the vast conception which embraces all phenomena in 

 that unvarying sequence which he will come to call law. He 

 attains at last to a perception of causal relations, within whose 

 unbroken series the whole order of events is enchained. He 

 pictures the universe as a mechanism ; for chance he substi- 

 tutes fate. 



This is achievement sublime ; how did it come ? 



