It is customary to divide human movements into three classes, voluntary, reflex and
mechanical. We may illustrate the distinction by a quotation from William James ("Psychology," i,
`So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere
mechanical industry.
"My friend Drowne;" said Copley, smiling to himself, but alluding to the
mechanical and wooden cleverness that so invariably distinguished the images, "you are really a remarkable person!
His mouth was such a postoffice of a mouth that he had a
mechanical appearance of smiling.
He knew that by this term was understood a
mechanical facility for painting or drawing, entirely apart from its subject.
Moreover, as an oligarchy is said to be a government of men of family, fortune, and education; so, on the contrary, a democracy is a government in the hands of men of no birth, indigent circumstances, and
mechanical employments.
I knew it was an uncurtained aperture in my friend's "machine-shop," and I had little doubt that he had resumed the studies interrupted by his duties as my instructor in
mechanical consciousness and the fatherhood of Rhythm.
In those days conversation was still cultivated as an art; a neat repartee was more highly valued than the crackling of thorns under a pot; and the epigram, not yet a
mechanical appliance by which the dull may achieve a semblance of wit, gave sprightliness to the small talk of the urbane.
He looked me over in my general effect of base
mechanical, and asked me if I had given up the law; I had only to answer him I had, and our conference ended.
She wondered as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the room, mere
mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out, with heads bended over their work, tales of imagined or real girlhood happiness, past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages.
In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for
mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.
But the projectile must describe a curve unalterably determined by the laws of
mechanical reasoning.