Today we—men and women :

Today we—men and women, humanity in general—have become accustomed to believe the great ideology that a machine is an indispensable appurtenance of human life. We cannot do anything without the assistance of a machine. This shows the subsidiary character of man in comparison with the gigantic operative mechanisms that he has considered necessary not only for his satisfaction, but even for his existence. He manufactures arms, not perhaps obviously for an immediate satisfaction, but for a security in regard to his own existence. Even his existence is controlled by a machine. He cannot be sure that he will be here for a few minutes unless a machine operates around him; and a machine need not necessarily be a typewriter, a printing machine, a motorcar or an airplane.



Now trying to bring our minds to the very concept of mechanism, which is a way of thinking, rather than an object visualised with our eyes. There is a philosophy which sometimes goes by the name of ‘mechanism’. We know very well that a philosophy cannot be a machine which we can obtain from a market. It is not a thing, it is not a substance, and it is not anything that is tangible. It is a conceptualisation and a certain outlook of the psyche of the human being—we may say the outlook as a whole of a particular set of people. This is called a mechanistic philosophy, and it has its roots in that which goes by the name of a scientific evaluation of things. 



In some way, classical science is mechanistic, though I do not say that every science is so. Today the discoveries of science have awakened the scientist himself to a novel presentation by nature—that it is perhaps not working on mechanistic lines, though scientists such as Newton, etc., thought that there is nothing but mathematics working in the universe. Maybe mathematics is working even now, but it is working only at a certain level of human life. We need machines only under certain circumstances of life, and it is not true that we need mechanisms always, under every circumstance. That this is a truth may not occur to our minds, since we have not found time to think of conditions of living where machines may not be of any utility to us, or even help to save us. There is something in us which cannot be amenable to the operation of a machine. None of us would believe that we are only machines, though from the point of view of a behavioural psychologist, or a pure atomist, or a physiologist, we may be appearing to work like stereotyped machines, measurable by the rods of medical science and intelligible from the philosophy that is behind this approach. 



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