Mechanism replaced process and becoming with structure and identity.

Evidence

Mechanism eliminated from the description of nature concepts of spatial hierarchy, value, purpose, harmony, quality, and form central to the older organic description of nature, leaving material and efficient causes—matter and force. Motion was not an organic process but a temporary state of a body’s existence relative to the motion or rest of other bodies. The mathematizing tendencies in Newtonian thought which emphasized not the process of change, but resistance to change, the conservation of a body’s motion, and the planets and satellites as ideal spheres and point sources of gravitational force were manifestations of the mechanical philosophers’ concern with geometrical idealization, stability, structure, being, and identity, rather than organic flux, change, becoming, and process. In mechanism the primacy of process was thus superseded by the stability of structure. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1023

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the precise conceptual content mechanism stripped out (value, purpose, harmony, quality) — key contrast term defining the organic-mechanic binary the whole book runs on.
• XREF: connects to: Model making tries to fix Relation’s movement into dynamic structures. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 871; Reversal that revalues the subordinated identity without restructuring it stays trapped in dualism — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 244; Man is a process, the product of his own actions — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1256

Broader Connections

• Model making tries to fix Relation’s movement into dynamic structures. #expands (0.85) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 871
• Man is a process, the product of his own actions #contradicts (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1256
• Reversal that revalues the subordinated identity without restructuring it stays trapped in dualism #corroborates (0.75) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 244