TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
By Lewis Mumford. New York: Haicourt, Brace and Company. 1934, $4.50. pp. 495.
Contemporary civilization can not be understood without a comprehension of the development and present significance o£ modern technical processes, dependent largely on the machine. Mr. Mumford has presented these subjects with an admirable grasp of detail and a breath-taking sweep of understanding and interpretation. One feels that he has hitherto been traveling slowly and painfully along the dimly lighted and somewhat confused corridor of fragmentary knowledge and observation, and that now for the first time the contents of the corridor are brightly illuminated—by the flashes of Mr. Mumford's genius as an imaginative generalizer. The facts have been collected diligently, but then any plodding investigator can light a match here and there, and describe what is revealed. Genius comes in effective imagination and generalization. Mr. Mumford's illuminating flashes of insight bring into sharp relief objects and ideas which were vague or invisible before. Flares have always the limitation of illuminating some objects too vividly and of throwing others into deep shadow, but many such flashes from various angles more than compensate for any difficulties inherent in this form of exploration. Mr. Mumford has been sufficiently bold not to limit himself to the past and present, but to be willing to cast the light of his intelligence upon the future and to give us at least the illusion of discerning ideas and trends waiting to be born.
In tracing the development of technics from the Middle Ages to the present, Mr. Mumford has disposed finally of the lingering concept that the first considerable use of machinery came in England some time after the middle of the Eighteenth Century. In his estimation (p. 14) "the clock, not the steam engine, is the keymachine of the modern industrial age," and the clock was in use certainly as early as the Tenth Century. He shows with great clarity and understanding the development of the background, technical, economic and ideational, for more recent technical changes. He divides the history of the machine into three stages, of which the second corresponds with what we usually call the "industrial revolution"; the third is only now being born. Finally, he analyzes the influence of the machine on our present civilization, and estimates the possibility of using it more wisely in the future. The writing is beautifully done—clear-cut and sparkling, with scarcely a page failing to reveal one or more extremely effective pieces of imaginative insight.
Mr. Mumford's attitude toward the machine is sophisticated but not skeptically disillusioned. He holds that (p. 365) "the machine is no longer the paragon of progress and the final expression of our desires: it is merely a series of instruments, which we will use in so far as they are serviceable to life at large, and which we will curtail where they infringe upon it or exist purely to support the adventitious structure of capitalism."
For several years, particularly since his lectures on the Guernsey Center Moore foundation, Mr. Mumford has been a significant part of Dartmouth life. His frequent visits have been appreciated by hundreds of undergraduates. It is consequently with special pleasure that a Dartmouth audience will greet this fine outpouring of Mr. Mumford's genius. One may regret, however, that Mr. Mumford's influence on Dartmouth has had no evident counterpart in influence by Dartmouth on Mr. Mumford, unless one except the Orozco frescoes that are reproduced as the frontispiece of the present book.
Tramping in the Jotunheim by Dr. Frederick P. Lord '98 appears in the June issue of Appalachia.
Prof. William A. Eddy is the author of an article Interpreters of the Age of Swift, reprinted from Studies i?i Philology, July, *934-
Harcourt, Brace and Company have published a 1934 edition of The College Omnibus by Prof. James D. McCallum. This is a revised edition of a previous work of the same title.
Harper and Company have published Prose Preferences—Second Series edited by Prof. Sydney Cox and Edmund Freeman.
The issue of the New Yorker for June 30 contains a poem by Prof. K. A. Robinson Nightingales in Nassau Street. Prof. Robinson's poem Luke Tanner's Daughter which was printed in the February issue of Scribners is being reprinted in England in Thomas Moult's anthology The Best Poemsof 1934 published by Jonathan Cape. His poem Ballads of French Hotels originally printed in the New Yorker has been reprinted in Clay Morgan's travel anthology Fun En Route.
