Signs of the Times (mechanics/dynamics)

Carlyle, Thomas. "Signs of the Times." Edinburgh Review #98 (1829). Coll. Thomas Carlyle: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. 5 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1899. New York: AMS P, 1969. Centenary Edition of The Works of Thomas Carlyle. Vol. II (Vol. XXVII in the thirty-vol. Works).

A very influential essay contrasting the "outward" vision of the world, translated into attempts to control nature and humans through "Mechanics," and the "inward" attempt of "Dynamics" to understand "the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man," which TC sees possessed of "a truly vital and infinite character" (Works 66 and 68 f.). In "the Mechanical Age" of early 19th-c. Europe, people have "grown mechanical in head and in heart," with even philosophers organized into institutes that are "like so many . . . hives" (59, 63, 62). Deals with the metaphor of "the Machine of Society" and compares "Mechanism" to "some glass bell" that "encircles and imprisons us" (66, 81, and passim). Discussed by L. Marx in ch. IV, sections 3 and 4, of Machine in the Garden (q.v. this Category).[1]