Page:The Kinematics of Machinery.djvu/42

20 in the way already enlarged upon, formed only steps leading up to their present successors. All have been thought out by human brains,—now and then by brains of special capacity, and then praised as God-sent gifts,—but in all cases.

And to-day just as formerly ; and this forms the problem which it must be the chief aim of theoretical Kinematics to solve. So long as it could not reach the elements and mechanisms of machines without the aid of invention, present or past, it could not pretend to the character of a science, it was strictly speaking mere empiricism—(sometimes even of a very primitive kind),—appearing in garments borrowed from other sciences. When however its investigations enable it to furnish the, it will begin to deserve the name of Science. It will then itself point out the true classification of its own material. It can put before itself the question as to the change of one motion into another, and decide as its own director whether really and to what extent a division founded upon this is important. As a genuine science, moreover, it will find its laws in itself, and require no Lycurgus to deliver them from without.

Here we reach another weighty and notable consequence. If the processes of thought by which the existing mechanisms have been built up are known, it must be possible to continue the use of these processes for the same purpose;—they must furnish the means for arriving at new mechanisms—must, that is to say, take up the position hitherto assigned to invention. I hope not to fall under the suspicion of saying anything so absurd as that the new method will make it possible for the commonplace head to become oracularly inventive like that of the genius. The case is rather that it will become possible to introduce into machine-problems those intellectual operations with which science everywhere else pursues her investigations. I have attempted already to show that Invention, in those cases especially where it succeeds, is ; if we then have the means of systematizing the latter, so far as our subject goes, we shall have prepared the way for the former.

Göthe,—who had so great an interest in the inner nature of