To urge the necessity of learning practical fitting as a part of an engineering education is superfluous. A mechanical engineer who has not been "through the shop" can never expect to attain success, nor command the respect even of the most inferior workmen; without a power of influencing and controlling others, he is neither fitted to direct construction, nor to manage details of any kind connected with engineering industry. There is nothing that more provokes a feeling of resentment in the mind of a skilled man than to meet with those who have attempted to qualify themselves in the theoretical and commercial details of engineering work, and then assume to direct labour which they do not understand; nor is a skilled man long in detecting an engineer of this class; a dozen words in conversation upon any mechanical subject is generally enough to furnish a clue to the amount of practical knowledge possessed by the speaker.
IX.Utilitarianism agrees with the ancient hedonism in holding pleasure to be the sole good and pain the sole evil. Its adherents also, for the most part, admit that the desire of the one and the dread of the other are the sole motives to action; but, while making the end absolutely universal and impersonal, they make the motive into a momentary impulse, without any necessary relation to the future happiness of the agent himself. The good man does his duty because doing it gives him pleasure, or because the failure to do it would give him pain, at the moment; although he knows that a contrary course would save him from greater pain or win him greater pleasure hereafter. No accurate thinker would call this acting from a selfish or interested motive; nor does it agree with the teaching of Epicurus. Were all sensitive beings to be united in a single organism, then, on utilitarian principles, self-interest, interpreted in the sense of seeking its own preservation and pleasure, would be the only law that the individualised aggregate could rationally obey. But the good of each part would be rigorously subordinated to the good of the whole; and utilitarian morality desires that we should act as if this hypothesis were realised, at least in reference to our own particular interests. Now, the idea of humanity as forming such a consolidated whole is not Epicurean. It belongs to the philosophy which always reprobated pleasure, precisely because its pursuit is associated with the dereliction of public duty and with bitter rivalry for the possession of what, by its very nature, exists only in limited quantities, while the demand for it is unlimited or, at any rate, far exceeds the supply. According to the Stoics, there was only one way in which the individual could study his private425 interest without abandoning his position as a social being, and this was to find it exclusively in the practice of virtue.575 But virtue and public interest remained mere forms scantily supplemented by appeals to the traditional morality, until the idea of generalised happiness, of pleasure diffused through the whole community, came to fill them with substance and life.
If ever I get taken into my uncles airplane passenger line, Dick spoke up, I know wholl be Chief Pilotuntil Larry gets the experience to crowd Jeff out."I am afraid I am utterly in the dark, Lawrence," said Charlton.Writers on mechanical subjects, as a rule, have only theoretical knowledge, and consequently seldom deal with workshop processes. Practical engineers who have passed through a successful experience and gained that knowledge which is most difficult for apprentices to acquire, have generally neither inclination nor incentives to write books. The changes in manipulation are so frequent, and the operations so diversified, that practical men have a dread of the criticisms which such changes and the differences of opinion may bring forth; to this may be added, that to become a practical mechanical engineer consumes too great a share of one's life to leave time for other qualifications required in preparing books. For these reasons "manipulation" has been neglected, and for the same reasons must be imperfectly treated here. The purpose is not so much to instruct in shop processes as to point out how they can be best learned, the reader for the most part exercising his own judgment and reasoning powers. It will be attempted to point out how each simple operation is governed by some general principle, and how from such operations, by tracing out the principle which lies at the bottom, it is possible to deduce logical conclusions as to what is right or wrong, expedient or inexpedient. In this way, it is thought, can [6] be established a closer connection between theory and practice, and a learner be brought to realise that he has only his reasoning powers to rely on; that formul?, rules, tables, and even books, are only aids to this reasoning power, which alone can master and combine the symbol and the substance."Do enlighten us a little," Hetty pleaded.To a deed of dishonour been turned.28The next great forward step in speculation was taken by Anaximander, another Milesian, also of distinguished attainments in mathematics and astronomy. We have seen that to Thales water, the all-embracing element, became, as such, the first cause of all things, the absolute principle of existence. His successor adopted the same general point of view, but looked out from it with a more penetrating gaze. Beyond water lay something else which he called the Infinite. He did not mean the empty abstraction which has stalked about in modern times under that ill-omened name, nor yet did he mean infinite space, but something richer and more concrete than either; a storehouse of materials whence the waste of existence could be perpetually made good. The growth and decay of individual forms involve a ceaseless drain on Nature, and the deficiency must be supplied by a corresponding influx from without.A For, be it observed that, although the Greek thinkers were at this period well aware that nothing can come from nothing, they had not yet grasped the complementary truth inalienably wedded to it by Lucretius in one immortal couplet, that nothing can return to nothing; and Kant is quite mistaken when he treats the two as historically inseparable. Common experience forces the one on our attention much sooner than the other. Our incomings are very strictly measured out and accounted for without difficulty, while it is hard to tell what becomes of all our expenditure, physical and economical. Yet, although the indestructibility of matter was a conception which had not yet dawned on Anaximander, he seems to have been feeling his way towards the recognition of a circulatory movement pervading all Nature. Everything, he says, must at last be reabsorbed in the Infinite as a punishment for the sin of its separate existence.10 Some may find in this sentiment a note of Oriental10 mysticism. Rather does its very sadness illustrate the healthy vitality of Greek feeling, to which absorption seemed like the punishment of a crime against the absolute, and not, as to so many Asiatics, the crown and consummation of spiritual perfection. Be this as it may, a doctrine which identified the death of the whole world with its reabsorption into a higher reality would soon suggest the idea that its component parts vanish only to reappear in new combinations.
