FORE:There was a light supper in the dining-room. Countess Lalage talked fitfully, from time to time glancing at the clock. The gilt hands were striding on towards a quarter to twelve.VIII.
FORE:Cutting, as a process in converting material, includes the force to propel cutting edges, means to guide and control their action, and mechanism to sustain and adjust the material acted upon. In cutting with hand tools, the operator performs the two functions of propelling and guiding the tools with his hands; but in what [58] is called power operations, machines are made to perform these functions. In nearly all processes machines have supplanted hand labour, and it may be noticed in the history and development of machine tools that much has been lost in too closely imitating hand operations when machines were first applied. To be profitable, machines must either employ more force, guide tools with more accuracy, or move them at greater speed, than is attainable by hand. Increased speed may, although more seldom, be an object in the employment of machinery, as well as the guidance of implements or increased force in propelling them. The hands of workmen are not only limited as to the power that may be exerted, and unable to guide tools with accuracy, but are also limited to a slow rate of movement, so that machines can be employed with great advantage in many operations where neither the force nor guidance of tools are wanting.
FORE:A safe rule will be to assume that machinery mainly used and seen by the skilled should be devoid of ornament, and that machinery seen mainly by the unskilled, or in public, should have some ornament. Steam fire engines, sewing machines, and works of a similar kind, which fall under the inspection of the unskilled, are usually arranged with more or less ornament.
THREE:Pneumatic machinery, aside from results due to the elasticity of air, is analogous in operation to hydraulic machinery.
THREE:In the last chapter we considered the philosophy of Plato chiefly under its critical and negative aspects. We saw how it was exclusively from that side that he at first apprehended and enlarged the dialectic of Socrates, how deeply his scepticism was coloured by the religious reaction of the age, and how he attempted, out of his masters mouth, to overturn the positive teaching of the master himself. We saw how, in the Protagoras, he sketched a theory of ethics, which was no sooner completed than it became the starting-point of a still more extended and arduous enquiry. We followed the widening horizon of his speculations until they embraced the whole contemporary life of Hellas, and involved it in a common condemnation as either hopelessly corrupt, or containing within itself the seeds of corruption. We then saw how, by a farther generalisation, he was led to look for the sources of error in the laws of mans sensuous nature and of the phenomenal world with which it holds communion; how, moreover, under the guidance of suggestions coming both from within and from without, he reverted to the earlier schools of Greek thought, and brought their results into parallelism with the main lines of Socratic dialectic. And finally, we watched him planting a firm foothold on the basis of mathematical demonstration; seeking in the very constitution of the soul itself for a derivation of the truths which sensuous experience could not impart, and winning back from215 a more profoundly reasoned religion the hope, the self-confidence, the assurance of perfect knowledge, which had been formerly surrendered in deference to the demands of a merely external and traditional faith. That God alone is wise, and by consequence alone good, might still remain a fixed principle with Plato; but it ceased to operate as a restraint on human aspiration when he had come to recognise an essential unity among all forms of conscious life, which, though it might be clouded and forgotten, could never be entirely effaced. And when Plato tells us, at the close of his career, that God, far more than any individual man, is the measure of all things,133 who can doubt that he had already learned to identify the human and divine essences in the common notion of a universal soul?
