Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08918_Field_TCGG T683.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 929b | 16 lines

that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in a strait,
where the foremost is driven by him that is next to him, and
the next by him that followeth him.” (74)

     More than two hundred years before Thomas Huxley’s
idea of the educated mind as a “clear cold logic engine with all
its parts of equal strength” we encounter the principle of
movable types and replaceable parts extended to social
organization. But let us note that it is a meaningless principle
where the uniform processing of minds by the habit of reading
the printed word has not occurred. In a word, individualism,
whether in the passive atomistic sense of drilled uniformed
soldiery or in the active aggressive sense of private initiative
and self-expression, alike assumes a prior technology of
homogeneous citizens. This scabrous paradox has haunted
literate men in every age. In the later nineteenth century it