THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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connecting­rods, reminiscent of skeleton limbs, which thrust down the crank­heads, and pull them up again: ‘And deep in the half­light other rods dodged deliberately
to and fro, crossheads nodded, discs of metal rubbed smoothly against each other, slow and gentle, in a commingling of shadows and gleams.’ This sort of thing, in its
expressive and unerring movements, still looks like an artificial organism or also like a natural mechanism. But the technology which has developed in the present
century shows less and less resemblance to human limbs and proportions, and the steam­engine only gives a final greeting, itself only the semblance of a greeting to the
old organoid series. The retort is no longer a mixing bowl or kneading­trough in which given existing substances are combined and remodelled into forms which are not
very remote from them; and the big machine disposes of the final organic resemblance. If the rod, shaft, bearing, ball­bearing, wheel, cogwheel, transmission and all
other machine components were already the beginning of de­organization, this is all the more true of their combination, the machine as work­transformer. Not merely is
the organic guideline broken down in it, but another break or constraint redisposes things here, one in the physical guideline itself. A machine as a whole, as defined by
Reuleaux, ‘is a combination of resistant elements which are so arranged that by means of them mechanical forces are compelled to operate under set conditions’.
Although this definition, in accordance with the nineteenth­century way of thinking, omits any human final designation, and hence the social, unnaturalistic purpose which
mechanical forces are compelled to achieve, it is still evident that machinery itself is already an unnaturalistic occurrence, a kind of unnatural physics. And within it the
repulsion to the given naturalistic element increases even further; organic projection is increasingly abandoned or transcended. The electric locomotive is a colossus
from no man's land, and the rocket­propelled aircraft that shoots through the stratosphere is not even like a propeller and wing in relation to the bird, but like a meteor.
This is all the more true of the possible technology derived from the hitherto remotest power drives: the sub­atomic ones, and from the transformers into which these are
conducted. With this technology, not just organic projection is abandoned but also partly the realm of the at least three­dimensional mechanical world, in which the
electric locomotive, the diesel engine, and the rocket­propelled aircraft are still located. Graphic classical mechanics itself is thereby abandoned: in the electron ‘nothing
looks like anything at all any more’, electrons and protons are no longer the matter of the old physical world. Even if they are by no means, as their idealistic interpreters
say, ‘mathematical­logical