machine.

Now it is only in the last three hundred years that any human being
seems to have anticipated this. It stimulates the imagination to
remark how entirely it was overlooked as a modifying cause in human
development. [Footnote: It is interesting to note how little even
Bacon seems to see of this, in his New Atlantis.] Plato clearly had
no ideas about machines at all as a force affecting social
organisation. There was nothing in his world to suggest them to him.
I suppose there arose no invention, no new mechanical appliance or
method of the slightest social importance through all his length of
years. He never thought of a State that did not rely for its force
upon human muscle, just as he never thought of a State that was not
primarily organised for warfare hand to hand. Political and moral
inventions he saw enough of and to spare, and in that direction he
still stimulates the imagination. But in regard to all material
possibilities he deadens rather than stimulates. [Footnote: The lost
Utopia of Hippodamus provided rewards for inventors, but unless
Aristotle misunderstood him, and it is certainly the fate of all
Utopias to be more or less misread, the inventions contemplated were
political devices.] An infinitude of nonsense about the Greek mind
would never have been written if the distinctive intellectual and
artistic quality of Plato's time, its extraordinarily clear
definition of certain material conditions as absolutely permanent,
coupled with its politico-social instability, had been borne in
mind. The food of the Greek imagination was the very antithesis of
our own nourishment. We are educated by our circumstances to think
no revolution in appliances and economic organisation incredible,
our minds play freely about possibilities that would have struck the
men of the Academy as outrageous extravagance, and it is in regard