Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon

[alice wellintown]

Young P mentions Mumford in one of his letters. Did he read Technic & Civ?


"The regularization of time, the increase in mechanical
  power, the multiplication of goods,  the contraction of
  time and space, the standardization of performance and
  product, the  transfer of skill to automata, and the
  increase in collective interdependence --these, then, are the chief
  characteristics of our machine civilization. They are the
  basis of the particular forms of life and modes of
  expression that distinguish Western Civilization, at least
  in degree, from the various earlier civilizations that
  preceded it.
                   Lewis Mumford, Technic and Civilization, p. 281

"The application of quantitative methods of thought to the
  study of nature had its first manifestation in the regular
  measurement of time; and the new mechanical conception of
  time arose in part out of the routine of the monastery.
  Alfred Whitehead has emphasized the importance of the
  scholastic belief in the universe ordered by God as one of
  the foundations of modern physics: but behind that belief
  was the presence of order in the institutions of the Church
  itself."
                          --Mumford, Technics and Civilization

  The Benedictines, the working order, were, according to
  Coulton, Sombart, others, the original founders of modern
  Capitalism. Mumfords says, they "gave human enterprise the
  regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine…Eternity
  ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human
  actions."