ONE:By examining into the facts, an apprentice will find that all truly successful establishments have been founded and built upon the mechanical abilities of some person or persons whose skill formed a base upon which the business was reared, and that true skill is the element which must in the end lead to permanent success. The material and the labour which make up the first cost of machines are, taking an average of various classes, nearly equally divided; labour being in excess for the finer class of machinery, and the material in excess for the coarser kinds of work. The material is presumed to be purchased at the same rates by those of inferior skill as by those that are well skilled, so that the difference in the first, or manufacturing cost of machinery, is determined mainly by skill.
TWO:All right, Dick agreed cheerfully. But dont start in earning your nickname all over again, he warned.
ONE:Sir A. Grant is on stronger, or rather on more inaccessible ground, when he uses the distinction between the two reasons as involving a sort of idealistic theory, because here Aristotles meaning is much less clearly expressed. Yet, if our interpretation be the correct one, if the creative Nous simply means the forms of things acting through the imagination on the possibilities of subjective conception, Aristotles view will be exactly the reverse of that contended for by Sir Alexander; thought, instead of moulding, will itself be moulded by external reality. In no case have we a right to set an obscure and disputed passage against Aristotles distinct, emphatic, and reiterated declarations, that sensation and ideation are373 substantially analogous processes, taken together with his equally distinct declaration, that the objects of sensation are independent of our feelings. We think, indeed, that Sir A. Grant will find, on reconsideration, that he is proving too much. For, if the things which reason creates were external to the mind, then Aristotle would go at least as far as those extreme German idealists from whom his expositor is anxious to separate him. Finally, we would observe that to set up Aristotles distinction between form and matter in opposition to the materialistic theories of the present day, shows a profound misconception of its meaning. Form and matter are nowhere distinguished from one another as subject and object. Form simply means the attributes of a thing, the entire aggregate of its differential characteristics. But that this does not of itself amount to conscious reason we are told by Aristotle himself.269 On the other hand, the matter to which some philosophers attribute an independent existence, is not his matter at all, but just the sum of things minus consciousness. The Stagirite did not, it is true, believe in the possibility of such a universe, but only (as we have shown) because he was not acquainted with the highest laws of motion. Yet, even taking matter in his own technical sense, Aristotle would have agreed with Prof. Tyndall, that it contained the promise and the potency of all future life, reason alone excepted. He tells us very clearly that the sensitive soul is a somatic function, something which, although not body, belongs to body; and this we conceive is all that any materialist would now contend for.270 And having gone so far, there really was nothing to prevent him from going a step farther, had he only been acquainted with the dependence of all intelligence on nervous action. At any rate, the tendency is now to obliterate the distinction where he drew it, and to substitute for it another distinction which he neglected. While all functions of consciousness, from the most elementary374 sensation to the most complex reasoning, seem to pass into one another by imperceptible gradations, consciousness in general is still separated from objective existence by an impassable chasm; and if there is any hope of reconciling them it lies in the absolute idealism which he so summarily rejected. What we have had occasion repeatedly to point out in other departments of his system, is verified once more in his psychology. The progress of thought has resulted from a reunion of the principles between which he drew a rigid demarcation. We have found that perception can only be understood as a process essentially homogeneous with the highest thought, and neither more nor less immaterial than it is. On the objective side, both may be resolved into sensori-motor actions; on the subjective side, into groups of related feelings. And here, also, we have to note that when Aristotle anticipates modern thought, it is through his one great mediating, synthetic conception. He observes incidentally that our knowledge of size and shape is acquired, not through the special senses, but by motionan aper?u much in advance of Locke.271
TWO:"Will you have the goodness to look at these," he asked.
ONE:Far behind them in their swift chase, with every ounce of power put into their engine and their whole hearts urging it to better speed, the Sky Patrol saw the amphibian swerve toward shore and give up the try for whatever that precious life preserver had attached to it.
TWO:Referring again to the hammer problem, it will be found by examining the history that the makers of automatic-acting steam-hammers capable of giving the dead stamp blow, have employed the principle which has been described. Instead of employing the momentum, or the gravity of moving parts, to open the valve after the hammer stops, some engineers have depended upon disengaging valve gear by the concussion and jar of the blow, so that the valve gearing, or a portion of it, fell and opened the valve. The 'dead blow gear,' fitted to the earlier Nasmyth, or Wilson, hammers, was constructed on the latter plan, the valve spindle when disengaged being moved by a spring.
