When we come to our Western Civilization, we find no difficulty in detecting our bent or bias. It is or course, a penchant towards machinery : a concentration of interest and effort and ability upon applying the discoveries of Natural Science to material purposes through the ingenious construction of material and social clockwork (material engines such as steamships and motor-cars and sewing-machines and wrist-watches and fire-arms and bombs; and social engines such as parliamentary constitutions and military mobilization systems). We are acutely aware that this is our Western bent; but we are possibly apt to under-estimate the length of the time during which our Western energies have been flowing in this direction.
We sometimes talk as though our Western “Machine Age” were no older than the modern Western Industrial Revolution which began little more than a century and a half ago; and it is true that less than two centuries and a half ago the polite society of Holland and England (which were two of the most commercially-minded Western countries of the day) was disgusted at the base mechanic êthos of Russian Peter. Peter the Great, however, was manifestly a
lusus Naturae; and the disgusting impression which he made upon the sensibilities of the Bishop Burnet and a King William III as a barbarian whose barbarism was accentuated and not redeemed by his amazing but unedifying mechanical talent is precisely the impression which
Homo Occidentalis himself has usually made upon the children of other civilisations since very early days. This is how
Homo Occidentalis was regarded in China and Japan in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era; and he was regarded in much the same way in the Orthodox Christian World eight centuries earlier when he burst upon the East Roman Empire in the First Crusade. Anna Comnena’s description of the cross-bow – “a barbarian weapon which is entirely unknown to the Hellenes” – might serve,
mutatis mutandis, for a description of a modern Western rifle from the pen of a nineteen-century Confucian
literatus. The Byzantine authoress brings out the ingenuity of construction and length of range and power of penetration and deadliness of effect of this Western lethal weapon, and sums it up as a "really devilish contrivance". There are a number of other symptoms that indicate how early this mechanical trend declared itself in Western history. Clock-work, for example, in the literal sense, appears to have been invented in the West in the same century as the cross-bow; and in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era Roger Bacon, within the bosom of the Western Society, was as notable a forerunner of the latter-day
Homo Occidentalis Mechanicus as the alien Peter Alexeyevich four centuries later.
It is even possible that the first stirrings of our Western mechanical activity may be discerned at much earlier date, when he "apparented" Hellenic Society was still in being and the "affiliated" Western Society was only in gestation, awaiting the hour of its birth.
It is at any rate one of the curiosity of history that the sole instance of the application of mechanical invention to practical economic life which appears to be recorded in Hellenic annals had its locus in Gaul: a region which was not incorporated into the Hellenic world until its latter days, and which always remained on its fringe, but which had been the homeland and heart of the Western World at every stage of the Western Cililization. This Galic apparatus -- the existence of which is attested in the first century of the Christian Era, and again in the fourth -- seems "rudimentary" and "clumsy" to the modern Western scholar when he studies the original accounts of it at second-hand with the masterpieces of modern Western mechanical ingenuity in his mind as a standard of comparison.
Yet if we consider this labour-saving appliance in its Hellenic environment and appraise it on a Hellenic standard from a Hellenic standpoint, we shall be inclined to regard it as being almost as great a portent in the Roman Empire as the genius of Peter Alexeyevich was in Holy Russia. We feel ourselves here in the presence of something profoundly alien from the Hellenic genius. Is it fanciful to see in this "rudimentary" and "clumsy" Gallic reaping-machine a precocious pre-natal manifestation of the Western mechanical bent ?
=============
Le fragment ci-dessus est extrait du chapitre
Differentiation Through Growth du Volume III de
A Study of History d'Arnold Toynbee (5ème édition, 1951). L'auteur rappelle comment, de tout temps, l'Occident, depuis son coeur géographique (la Gaule) s'est distingué par l'art de la mécanique qui "économise la main-d'oeuvre", illustré par la première machine à moissonner en Gaule au 1er siècle de notre ère, art auquel les civilisations étrangères ont habituellement opposé incompréhension, mépris et "dégoût" avant d'être par lui
conquises. Les civilisations orientales et les mondes helléniques n'ayant pas fait exception à cette règle.