Inventing your world

History remains a ‘fable convenue’ chiefly because it wants fresh ideas but also because it wants scientifically thinking workers to reconstitute the life of past centuries. In each branch of science a revision of the current theories as well as new wide generalisations are wanted. And if the revision requires some of that inspiration of genius which moved Galileo and Newton, and which depends in its appearance upon general causes of human development, it requires also an increase in the number of scientific workers. When facts contradictory to current theories become numerous, the theories must be revised, and thousands of simple intelligent workers in science are required to accumulate the necessary facts. In short, there is not one single science which does not suffer in its development from a want of men and women endowed with a philosophical conception of the universe, ready to apply their forces of investigation in a given field, however limited, and having leisure for devoting themselves to scientific pursuits.

While industry, especially during the 20th, has been inventing on such a scale as to revolutionise the very face of the earth, science has been losing its inventive powers. Men of science invent no more or very little. Is it not striking indeed, that the steam engine, even in its leading principles, the railway engine, the steam boat, the telephone, the phonograph, the weaving machine, the lace machine, the lighthouse, the macadamised road, photography in black and in colours, and thousands of other things, have not been invented by professional men of science, although none of them would have refused to associate his name with any of the above named inventions? Men who hardly had received any education at school, who had merely picked up the crumbs of knowledge from the tables of the rich, and who made their experiments with the most primitive means - the attorney’s clerk Smeaton, the instrument maker Watt, the brakeman Stephenson, the jeweller’s apprentice Fulton, the millwright Rennie, the mason Telford, and hundreds of others whose very names remain unknown, were the real makers of modern civilisation; while the professional men of science, provided with all means for acquiring knowledge and experimenting, have invented little in the formidable array of implements, machines, and prime motors which has shown to humanity how to utilise and to manage the forces of nature.

Chemistry being an exception to the rule as the chemist are involved with so much manual work of examination. Recent revival in scientific inventiveness, especially in physics - is in a branch in which the engineer and the man of science are meeting so much together. Experimental Inventors and interpreters knew something which the savants do not know - they knew their surroundings which stimulates their inventive powers, and their original ideas; they knew the use of their hands; they knew machines; their leading principles and their work; they had breathed the atmosphere of the workshop and the building yard. We know how men of science will meet the reproach. That they discover the laws of nature, let others apply them; it is a simple division of labour. But such a rejoinder would be utterly untrue, the march of progress is quite the reverse, because in a hundred cases against one the mechanical invention comes before the discovery of the scientific law. It was not the dynamical theory of heat which came before the steam engine, it followed it. When thousands of engines already were transforming heat into motion under the eyes of hundreds of professors, and when they had done so for half a century, or more; when thousands of trains, stopped by powerful brakes, were disengaging heat and spreading sheaves of sparks on the rails at their approach to the stations; when all over the civilised world heavy hammers and perforators were rendering burning hot the masses of iron they were hammering and perforating - then, and then only, Seguin and Mayer ventured to bring out the mechanical theory of heat with all its consequences; and yet the men of science ignored the work of Sequin and almost drove Mayer to madness by obstinately clinging to their mysterious caloric fluid. Worse than that, they described Joule’s first determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat as ‘unscientific’.

When thousands of engines had been illustrating for some time the impossibility of utilising all the heat disengaged by a given amount of burnt fuel, then came the second law of Clausius. When all over the world industry already was transforming motion into heat, sound, light, and electricity, and each one into each other, then only came Grove’s theory of the ‘correlation of physical forces’; and Grove’s work had the same fate before the Royal Society as Joule’s. the publication of his memoir was refused with much delay. It was not the theory of electricity which gave us the telegraph. When the telegraph was invented, all we knew about electricity was but a few facts more or less badly arranged in our books. One could easily multiply the illustrations by quoting the great processes of metallurgy; the alloys and the properties they acquire from the addition of very small amounts of some metals or metalloids. The flight of genius which has characterised the workers at the outset of modern industry has been missing in our professional men of science. And they will not recover it as long as they remain strangers to the world, amidst their dusty bookshelves; as long as they are not workers themselves, amidst other workers, at the blaze of the iron furnace, at the machine in the factory, at the turning lathe in the engineering workshop; sailors amidst sailors on the sea.

For thousands of years in succession to grow one’s food was the burden, almost the curse, of mankind. But it need be so no more, if you make yourselves the soil, and partly the temperature and the moisture which each crop requires, you will see that to grow the yearly food of a family, under rational conditions of culture, requires so little labour that it might almost be done as a mere change from other pursuits. If you return to the soil, and cooperate with your neighbours instead of erecting high walls to conceal yourself from their looks; if you utilise what experiment has already taught us, and call to your aid science and technical invention, which never fail to answer to the call - look only at what they have done for warfare - you will be astonished at the facility with which you can bring a rich and varied food out of the soil. You will admire the amount of sound knowledge which your children will acquire by your side, the rapid growth of their intelligence and the facility with which they will grasp the laws of nature animate and inanimate.

Have the factory and the workshop at the gates of your fields and gardens, and work in them. Not those factories in which children lose all the appearance of children in the atmosphere of an industrial hell, but those airy and hygienic, and consequently economical, factories in which human life is of more account than machinery and the making of extra profits, of which we already find a few samples here and there, factories and workshops into which men, women and children will not be driven by hunger, but will be attracted by the desire of finding an activity suited to their tastes, and where, aided by the motor and the machine, they will choose the branch of activity which best suits their inclinations.

In sum, as to the grand inspirations which unhappily have been so much neglected in most of the discussions about art - and which are missing in science as well - these can be expected only when humanity breaking its present bonds, shall make a new start in the higher principles of solidarity, doing away with the present duality of moral sense and philosophy.

Extracted from:
Kropotkin, P., Fields, Factory, and Workshops: Brain work and manual work, (first published 1912), Transaction publishers, UK, 1992