Applied knowledge has no mysteries then. It consists in 
segmentation of any process or any situation or any human 
being. The Machiavellian power technique is exactly the one 
ridiculed by Ben Jonson and Shakespeare in the passages 
above. One observes a human being to see “what makes him 
tick.” That is, you reduce him to a machine. Then you isolate 
his ruling passion, the fuel of the machine. Then you have him. 
Wyndham Lewis has given a fine account of these Machiavellian 
techniques as they appear in Elizabethan drama in The Lion  
and the Fox , from which we had seen earlier his description of 
the Hollywood aspect of Italian princely architecture.

     It is not only people that are reduced to things by the 
segmental itemizing methods of the new print culture. Father 
Ong points out in “Ramist Method and the Commercial Mind” 
(p. 167):