Page:The Kinematics of Machinery.djvu/264

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stand out separately before us. Just as the poet contrasts the gentle and lovable Odyssean wanderers with the untamable Cyclops, the "lawless-thougthed monsters," so appears to us the unrestrained power of natural forces, acting and reacting in limitless freedom, bringing forth from the struggle of all against all their inevitable but unknown results, compared with the action of forces in the machine, carefully constrained and guided so as to produce the single result aimed at. Wise restriction creates the State, by it alone can its capacities receive their full development; by restriction in the machine we have gradually become masters of the most tremendous forces, and brought them completely under our control.

§ 51.
The Present Tendency of Machine Development.

In the foregoing paragraphs I have had to oppose the customary and very widely diffused notion that the first requirement in the primitive machine was the execution of certain work, and I have shown that this view is essentially erroneous. We have seen rather that this first requirement, the one out of which machinal ideas gradually formed themselves, was the production of motion. It in no way follows from this that the requirement of work did not influence the matter. We found, on the contrary, that questions of force entered very distinctly into the history of machine-development, and that they left their impress upon its inner and more characteristic kinematic manner of growth.

The external impulses affecting the growth of the machine move therefore in two lines : the first and earliest in its action was the want of various kinds of motion, the other, that of the execution of work. These impulses run side by side, uniting here and there and then separating again, both continually helping forward the perfecting of the machine. Apparatus for war and for construction, especially for the moving of heavy loads, demands always an increase of its capacity to deal with forces; manufacturing instruments, on the other hand, those for time-measuring, and many others, require the extension of the number of motions which they can execute. The two directions can to-day, in spite of our more advanced scientific position, which has shown us the right