358 The Philosophy of Evolution. 



day within his dominions ? And the press is the child of 

 materialism. It prints its sheets for gain. In the dialect 

 of the street, it is pushed to make money. 



In the uses of machinery, too, we may vaunt the praises 

 of materialism in its plainest aspect. Mr. Matthew Arnold, 

 in his pleasant way, depreciates our devotion to machinery, 

 and would rather have us use the freedom of the spirit as 

 the better method. And he attacks the whole manner of 

 modern advance, and sings the praises of mere culture, — 

 "hearing and reading the best things there are going/' as 

 the Greeks of Plato's time are falsely supposed to have 

 been doing for the most part. But it is quite certain, to 

 anyone who has an open eye to the world, that machinery 

 has clone more to transform the world to something like 

 Plato's ideal Republic, in one century, than all the unme- 

 chanical centuries for twenty-two hundred years had done 

 before. Machineries of steel and wood create machineries 

 of moral and spiritual movement as well, and furnish irre- 

 sistible agencies to promote public virtue such as never 

 before existed; and the more machinery, the wider spread 

 is virtue. Who ever heard of a savage tribe, without ma- 

 chinery as they are, as able to do anything worth doing 

 except for mischief and destruction ? Mr. Arnold himself 

 remained but as the " wandering voice " of the cuckoo in 

 the glades of society, because his ideas could not organize 

 a machinery for their propagation among mankind at large. 

 Material embodiments are more than lofty expressions, and 

 the church itself is great, more by its machinery, than by 

 its ideas. A new machine for traveling by telegraph would 

 enlarge the human mind more rapidly than all the colleges 

 and book-learned authors in Christendom can do. 



Machinery forces men to become exact, punctual, regu- 

 larly industrious, and sober. It compels them to study the 

 properties of materials, to learn new truth constantly, and 

 conform themselves to it. Men become more observant 

 under its tuition. The commonest factory-girl has her dull 

 and aimless mind somewhat quickened and focused by the 

 precision of its work and the exactitude it demands of her. 

 It turns the vagrant savage into a thoughtful artisan, makes 

 an Ericsson, an Edison, a Bessemer, an Eifel, possible, and 

 is so far from degrading men to its level that it raises them 

 immeasurably. Think of saying that a Digger Indian is 

 degraded to the level of a Corliss Engine ! The engine is 



