结构：万事万物为什么不会倒塌？

• Joan

  2025-03-02
  If the country has gone up in the aesthetic world, the towns have certainly come down. Nowadays when we deplore English towns and factories we are deploring the product of philistine reformers and engineers and architects and businessmen and the little grey men who sit in council offices and the bigger grey men who sit in Parliament. Of these people’s sins, it is not enough to say that they know not what they do; for we do that which is inherent in our natures – as Plato well knew. It is at least arguable that the countryside is more attractive than the town not because the country is more ‘natural’ but because town and country were made, by and large, by very different kinds of people. *But the first thing is to see ugliness for what it is rather than accepting it as part of the natural o...
• Joan

  2025-03-02
  Before the eighteenth century, when most landscape was much wilder, educated men had a dread of ‘Nature’, which implied to them not only physical discomfort, but *Pan in the raw*. To these people it was the towns which were habitable and attractive, the country which was inhospitable and ugly. Today, when we admire the lovely English landscape we are really admiring something which was deliberately created by the civilized and intelligent English eighteenth-century landlords.
• Joan

  2025-03-02
  Thus, about the important things, each age has a totally closed mind. Nowadays, being materialists, we are duly horrified that our ancestors were prepared to tolerate physical poverty and to inflict physical pain. But these same ancestors would be just as horrified that we should suffer many millions of people to experience every day the beastliness of London or New York; and that those who work in our Dark Satanic Mills should have to be well paid to put up with noise and ugliness which are largely unnecessary. Even the ‘clinical’ decor and atmosphere of modern hospitals would seem to them to add a new terror to dying. Therefore many of us seek some kind of relief or consolation in ‘Nature‘ and we escape, when we can, to the country, because we find the countryside more agreeable than tow...
• Joan

  2025-03-02
  We ‘Compound for sins (we) are inclined to/By damning those (we) have no mind to.’ And, as Professor Macneile Dixon once said,... contrast the middle centuries, that unique period in our European annals, with the centuries following upon the Renaissance. How different their respective views of the world, how opposed their systems of belief! Yet in each the doctrines universally held are felt as inevitable, as unassailable. Each age thinks itself in possession of the true and only view possible for sensible man.*
• Joan

  2025-03-02
  ‘Science’ has been attacked on almost every conceivable ground ever since the Renaissance; most of these attacks were more or less rubbish. But it is always strange to me that what seems the real argument against science is seldom raised, at least in a direct form. This is that science has subtly warped our system of values by teaching us to judge on grounds which are excessively functional. The modern man asks ‘What is this man or this thing for?’ rather than ‘What is this man or this thing?’ Herein, no doubt, lie the causes of many of our modern sicknesses. The aesthetic judgement seeks, however inadequately, to answer the broader and the more important question. Too often nowadays our subjective judgement clashes with our scientific (or banausic) judgement. But we sweep the aesthetic ju...
• Joan

  2025-03-02
  Although it is practically an article of religion with many engineers to believe in a close connection between functional ‘efficiency’ and appearance, I am, myself, sceptical. Of course, the grossly ineffectual will, and should, offend the eye, but I doubt if the refinements of technical performance really improve appearance very much. Very often it is the other way round; the pursuit of the last ounce of performance results in a boring appearance, as one can see in modern yachts. For myself, I stick to the belief that **what one gets aesthetically from an artefact is some combination of the personality of the maker with the accepted values of hisage**. If you walk down any street with** your eyes and your mind open** you can form your own judgement on both.
• Joan

  2025-03-02
  Although we may justly accuse modern engineers of philistinism, nearly all of them do cling to certain very important values which are unfashionable and unpopular in a **permissive age**. The chief of these are **objectivity and responsibility**. Engineers have to deal, not only with people and all their quirks and weaknesses, but also with **physical facts**. One can sometimes argue with people, and it is not difficult to deceive them; but it is of no use to argue with a physical fact. One cannot bully it or bribe it or legislate against it or pretend that the truth is something different or that the thing never happened at all. Laymen and politicians may create what fantasies they choose, but, for the engineers, ‘It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches ...
• Joan

  2025-03-02
  The passionate protest of the **Aesthetic movement** in the 1870s and 1880s against the ugliness of pretty well everything failed to have much effect. I think this was less because these people were guyed by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience and in the pages of Punch than because the movement was largely an **escapist** one and attacked the wrong targets. These sons of Mary failed to see that the root cause of all the brazen horrors which they hated so much lay, not in machinery itself, but in attitudes of mind. Like so many aesthetic reformers, they rejected technology instead of joining it. Perhaps if they had been prepared to learn technology and engineering they might have operated from within the system. But this is a laborious discipline which too many Arts people reject as being some...