right” and that Swift ridiculed in “the mechanickal operation of 
the Spirit.” It derives from a merely vision image of an 
uninterrupted chain of Being or a visual plenum of the good as 
“the best of all possible worlds.” Granted the merely visual 
assumptions of lineal continuity or of sequential dependence, 
the principle of non-interference in the natural order becomes 
the paradoxical conclusion of applied knowledge.

     Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the 
transformation of mechanization of crafts by the application of 
visual method  had proceeded slowly. But it was a procedure of 
maximal interference with existing non-visual modes. By the 
eighteenth century the process of applied knowledge had 
reached such a momentum that it became accepted as a 
natural process which must not be impeded save at the peril of 
greater evil: “all partial evil universal good.” Polanyi notes (p.