Natural magic and everyday machines jointly supplied mechanism’s power concept

Evidence

The mechanical philosophy took over the concept of power from both experiential and intellectual sources. The natural magic tradition which relied on the power of the magus to manipulate the occult powers within natural objects through external operations and physical arrangements, depended on a new image of the human being as operator. A second experiential source of power derived from the increasing use of two types of machines in the everyday lives of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Europeans. The nonautonomous machines (windmills, cranes, pumps, and so on) multiplied power through external operation by human or animal muscle or by natural forces such as wind or water. Autonomous machines such as clocks were internalized models of the ordered motions of the celestial spheres. The first were symbols of power, the second of order. Both were fundamental to the new value system of the modern world. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 829

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the operator role and the autonomous/nonautonomous machine distinction that underwrites mechanism’s power and order.
• XREF: connects to: Natural magic’s manipulation assumptions carried directly into mechanism — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 472; Magic preserved concrete particularity that science flattens into interchangeable matter; Cartesian mechanism evicted all spirits and occult qualities from nature — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 798 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Cartesian mechanism evicted all spirits and occult qualities from nature #expands (0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 798
• Magic preserved concrete particularity that science flattens into interchangeable matter #corroborates (0.75)