Part X
4 As key to understanding of Industrialization to a vitally useful degree one must comprehend the concept of the mechanical extension of man.
5 This concept starts with recognition of the scientific fact that the human ensemble is a compound mechanism and process, immeasurably superior in designing nicety to that as yet demonstrated by man, yet of the same school of technique as that maintained by the cosmic spearhead forces of contemporary science.
6 In this concept, for instance, the arm, hand, and finger assembly is a twenty-eight-jointed grappling crane, with integral thermo-couples and telephones at all points plus a self-lubricating and resurfacing system good for 70 to 100 years if well handled without going to the machine shop for repair. Likewise, the human ensemble contains a myriad of chemical plants, electronic convertors, et al, adding up in toto to encompass every mechanical and scientific phenomenon known to man as existing anywhere in the universe.
7 That this can be handled in a package of seven pounds F.O.B.
8 with free surprise premiums of special family traits thrown in weightless is so super remarkable even to the most experienced technologist that he still fails willingly to classify it with such gross machinery
9 as that which he himself contrives to build externally, objectively, consciously, preferring to sidestep the issue by filing it for the continuous nonce under topics,—‘‘vaguely mystical.’’ The scientific structure and process concept of human beings
10 is eschewed by artists as being ‘‘mechanistic’’ but paradoxically it is these artists who are themselves mechanistic rather than the scientists who hold strictly with this philosophy.
11 This paradox of mistaken philosophic allegiance or leaning may be enlighteningly amplified by pursuing the scientific concept.
12 First it must be admitted, because the test has been made over and again in hospitals, that life weighs nothing. This is proven by the fact that humans as they die, scaled as they cross the borderline, lose no measurable weight.
13 Only one familiar perquisite is lost, and that is the most uniform characteristic common to man be he
14 Negro, Eskimo, Nazi, or Hollywood, English, Japanese, Malayan, or Jewish, and that is his temperature,— 98.6 Fahrenheit under the skin when in normal health, old or young, male or female, in the tropics, the antarctic, or New York City, on mountain top or submerged in the ocean.
15 Heat is one manifestation of energy, which like light, another manifestation, is a radiant wave motion integrally involving pure time and energy which compound as motion or speed— ergo the terms,—the ‘‘quick’’ and the ‘‘dead.’’
16 Energy, say some scientists, may possibly be proven to have weight, - mathematically,—by infinite inference,—but the point is still moot.
17 The fact does remain, however, that no quick human being other than the anatomy student, and briefly the undertaker, stone cutter, and florist is vitally interested in abandoned human mechanisms though by habit of association tenderly thoughtful about their disposition.
18 The fact remains true despite even the ghouls;—
19 metallurgists tell us
20 that the annual U.S.A.
21 post mortem gold mining
22 in tooth fillings and wedding rings
23 out produces the mining
24 from original ore bodies.
25 Though Roman soldiers in the madness of blood spilling are documented as having ‘‘employed’’ corpses, and ‘‘fiends’’ are periodic news, repugnance over those thoughts in sufficient to close the argument that: ---
26 the real entity life
27 which alone had common meaning and aught of any vital importance to living you and me
28 is non corporeal.
29 Moreover, the eye itself
30 does not see
31 any more than does a television set.
32 It is life alone that sees
33 by means of sun originated light reflected from the surfaces of external objects refracted through the eye lens and telegraphed to the brain
34 via the nerve cables
35 and analyzed spot for spot for the specific
36 frequencies, intensities, and wave lengths of each respective light spot
37 by the brain’s scanning mechanism whose filmed picture
38 is cut and continuitied at will
39 by the mind and ego.
40 But the brain,—the last tangible in the system,—is a central station mechanism as lifeless as a cathode ray anaylzer or a telephone switchboard minus operator.
41 One may even lose one or both eyes and keep on living—lose hair, teeth, a hand and two legs; in fact, in the course of a period sometimes estimated to be as short as seven years, undergo replacement of every tissue cell of the human ensemble from the inside out, but still continue in identity with the designating life facet label with which the original completely replaced flesh and bone being was identified,—that is with the name,—John, for instance.
42 ‘‘John’’ may be ten re-generations within the same identity even though the tenth bears no greater resemblance to the first, than does a chipmonk to a donkey,—two eyes, two ears, mouth, tail, and four limbs.
43 It is as though ‘‘John’’ metaphorically were born in a single room cabin on a farm on the south west corner of Fifth Avenue and thirty-fourth street in New York City in 1850, the event unwitnessed by you and me, —yet duly registered with the public ken by a notice in the newspaper;—whereby ‘‘John’’ legally existed.
44 And as John grew up his father added a large wing to the house, which was piece-meal replaced by rooms of a tavern operated by John which tavern was later on completely replaced by the Waldorf-Astoria though John never left the premises.
45 For he took a job as ‘‘superintendent’’ of the new building and switched from his old rooms to a temporary building ‘‘shack’’ always within the same space, while the old major exterior and its arterial system were being replaced by the newer.
46 And in like manner John later got a job as night watchman in the Empire State Building and transferred to it without leaving the premises when the Empire State replaced the old Waldorf in an eighteen month major surgical case.
47 And if, in the meantime, as the actuarians indicate as ‘‘probable,’’ ‘‘John’’ became a dual personality by marrying;
48 and a multiple personality by having children and grandchildren,—unseen to us outside the premises,—you can understand how difficult it is for us to know just who
49 is making the answers
50 to letters and telegrams sent to ‘‘John,’’ at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, N.Y.C., U.S.A. Year Fifteen Quadrillion and One.
51 And even on the telephone or through the door slightly ajar, which is a close as we may ever get to him, you can’t be certain that you are not listening to an excellently recorded transcription of ‘‘John’’ or of one of his kinsfolk, or possibly of one of his heroes or of the untraced legend of God knows who,—
52 adopted consciously or
53 even subconsciously by John when too lazy to think for himself.
54 But country shack or
55 Empire State exteriors were both tours de force,
56 as were also John’s blue suit, his overalls, and his integral flesh covered self-replacing industrial ensemble, of the phantom dweller continuity which we have oversimply designated as ‘‘John.’’
57 Chemists point out that at cost not over ninety-eight cents worth of basic chemical elements are involved in ‘‘John’s’’ fully grown integral dwelling structure and shell and its industrial subsidiaries.
58 Physicists point out that John’s mechanism considered as an engine
59 in competition with the electric dynamo can translate but $4.21 worth of energy (intaken directly or indirectly
60 from the sun and other stars, whence exclusively
61 comes all life and growth upon earth) into useful power output
62 as effective work
63 within his whole life time at 1940 retail rates for electric current in New York City.
64 Incidently sub-cosmic technologists and Public Utility business men speak of steam and gas engines improperly as ‘‘prime-movers.’’ Only life, that pre-sensory entity in its most infinite abstraction,—called God by us,—which infinite abstraction (together with the exclusively star emanating radiation of the energy spectrum:—X, Gamma, infra-red, ultra-violet, cosmic, light and heat, and probably other rays as yet undiscovered all first articulating as God’s faculties at one hundred and ninety-eight thousand miles per second) is not earth born;
65 and is that which by photo-synthetic chemistry first builds up John from miligram ovary to two hundred pound man and cyclically replenishes him; and alone in due course motivates John,—himself seemingly,—to organize and motivate engines;—this life can alone be logically accredited in strict scientific sense with any prime-moving.
66 Thus it may be deduced as inherent in the mechanical extension of man concept that where others have failed the scientist has by progressive elimination of all the entity categories with which he is sufficiently familiar to identify as known processes or dynamic interactions that life
67 while not isolatable as an ‘‘it is,’’—
68 at least is not
69 the gross physical mechanism
70 which it extensively builds
71 and employs,—
72 here on earth.