In a general way, one does not, at
the present time, look for a blameless filial piety among those
classes whose employment approaches that of the engineer and the
mechanician. These mechanical employments are in a degree a
modern fact. The handicraftsmen of earlier times, who served an
industrial end of a character similar to that now served by the
mechanician, were not similarly refractory under the discipline
of devoutness. The habitual activity of the men engaged in these
branches of industry has greatly changed, as regards its
intellectual discipline, since the modern industrial processes
have come into vogue; and the discipline to which the mechanician
is exposed in his daily employment affects the methods and
standards of his thinking also on topics which lie outside his
everyday work. Familiarity with the highly organized and highly
impersonal industrial processes of the present acts to derange
the animistic habits of thought. The workman's office is becoming
more and more exclusively that of discretion and supervision in a
process of mechanical, dispassionate sequences. So long as the
individual is the chief and typical prime mover in the process;
so long as the obtrusive feature of the industrial process is the
dexterity and force of the individual handicraftsman; so long the
habit of interpreting phenomena in terms of personal motive and
propensity suffers no such considerable and consistent
derangement through facts as to lead to its elimination.
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