In order to illustrate this thesis, I should like to consider a familiar period in the history of western technology: the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, roughly the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. It is well known that the Middle Ages was an era during which belief in magic was wellnigh universal.
Peasant women collected bits of fingernail and hair from the deceased heads of families in order to preserve the luck of the house. Every village had its resident cunning man, who told fortunes, found out thieves, sold love philters, and dispensed magical healing potions. Practically every disease known to medieval man had a magical remedy to cure it [[ Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), passim.]].
Nor were such beliefs restricted to the lower classes. At the very moment when modern science was emerging in the West during the Renaissance, intellectuals everywhere were enthusiastically proclaiming the arrival in Italy of a new text, the Corpus Hermeticum, supposedly the magical teachings of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, also known as « Hermes Trismegistus »[[ Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago,1964). ]]. And in the age of Newton, fashionable society in England was buzzing about the Irish occult healer, Valentine Greatrakes, who claimed than he had the gift to cure diseases by touch[[ Thomas, op. cit, 202-204. In addition, see Nicholas Steneck, « Greatrakes the Stroker:
The Interpretation of Historians », Isis, 73 (1982), 161-77; and Barbara Kaplan, « Greatrakes the Stroker: The Interpretation of His Contemporaries », Isis, 73 (1982), 178-85. ]]. All of these conceptions, noble and peasant, academic and popular, were nourished by the universally shared belief that the universe was peopled by demons, spirits, and occult forces.
Yet despite this milieu, so apparently hostile to science, the Middle Ages witnessed some of the most spectacular technological triumphs of our history.
To illustrate this, consider the following examples, selected from a host of technological breakthroughts[[
For the examples that follow, see Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962) and the bibliography cited therein. ]].
In the first place, northern Europeans came up with a series of inventions that created an entirely novel system of agriculture. The heavy wheeled plough enabled them to cultivate the rich bottomlands of the European plain; the threefield crop rotation system allowed them to put more acreage into cultivation and to diversify their diet with a spring planting of leguminous crops; and horseshoes, along with the newly-invented horse collar, enabled the peasant to take advantage of the greater speed and endurance of the horse over oxen for tilling his fields. We can reasonably estimate that when this system came into use, under ideal conditions productivity increased by some 200 percent.
Moreover, between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, the West developed novel means of applying the force of wind and water to industry. In 983, the first recorded fulling mill appeared on the banks of the Serchio in Tuscany; thirty years later others appear along a stream in Milan. Before the end of the eleventh century, we have evidence of the use of waterpower in the metal and textile industries from the Pyrennes to Britain. In 1185, the first horizontal-axle windmill appears, and within seven years this new device is found from Yorkshire to Syria, where it was taken by the German crusaders. In the thirteenth century, 120 windmills were built in the vicinity of Ypres alone. By the early fourteenth century, Europe was using wind and water power for tanning and laundering, sawing wood, crushing everything from olives to ore, operating the bellows of blast furnaces and the hammers of forges, for fulling cloth, papermaking, and reducing the mash for making beer.
In 1335, an Italian physician and engineer, Guido da Vigevano, presented to the king of France a manuscript containing drawings of new engines, including the first known automobile, a vehicle powered by men working the first known crankshafts. Another of his sketches showed a submarine with paddlewheels operated from inside; and a thir depicted a siege tower powered, like Guido’s automobile, by man-powered crankshafts supplemented, in case of a good breeze, by a windmill[[A. R. Hall, « Guido’s Texaurus, 1335,» in Bert S. Hall and Delno C. West, eds., On Premodern Technology and Science: Studies in Honor of Lynn White, jr. (Los Angeles, 1976), 13-52. In addition, see Bert S. Hall, « Guido da Vigevano’s Texaurus Regis Franciae, 1335 » in Studies on Medieval Fachliteratur, ed. William Eamon, Scripta, 6 (Brussels, 1982),33-84. ]].
Clearly, a technological revolution of unprecedented scale was taking place, a fact made all the more remarkable when we compare medieval technology with that of those rational, scientifically-minded Greeks of antiquity. Despite their sophisticated geometry, the Greeks could not put together a good beamed roof for the Parthenon. And though they were ingenious machine designers, the Greeks were totally uninterested in building these devices for purpose other than entertaining princes and increasing the mystery of temples[[A. G. Drachmann, The Mechanical Technology of Greek and Roman Antiquity, Acta Historia Scientiarum naturalium et Medicinalium, vol. 17 (Copenhagen, 1963). ]].
Was it a mere coincidence that the remarkable technological innovations of the Middle Ages occured within a cultural framework steeped in magic, religion, and superstition? I do not think so. Let us return to Malinowski’s speculation about the function of magic in primitive society. In the essay cited at the outset of this paper, Malinowski wrote, « The function of magic is to ritualize man’s optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism »[[Malinowski, op. cit, 90. ]]. Like pure fantasy, magic is a short cut to knowledge and power, and is no substitute for the arduous labor and mental energy that goes into developing techniques that actually work. Nevertheless, like fantasy, it does lead to concrete results, for it has a definite, practical aim associated with human needs and pursuits. Indeed, it has a singular aim: the conquest of nature and the taming of its brute forces for human use. In short, the dream of the magus is to control his environment. Though their methods differ, it is the dream of the modern engineer.
French 
Dutch