Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Young

Young’s jab lands because it flips a fashionable metaphor back on the people who wield it. In the late Enlightenment, “man as machine” was both a scientific brag and a moral demotion: if we’re mechanisms, the insinuation goes, we’re predictable, purposeless, basically wind-up matter. Young calls that move out as a double ignorance. The philosophers he targets don’t understand human nature, but they also don’t understand the thing they’re borrowing authority from: machinery.

The subtext is classed and practical. Young wrote in a Britain remade by agricultural “improvement” and the early industrial turn, when actual machines were becoming the symbol of modern power. For someone who has watched tools transform labor and land, a machine is not a spooky emblem of soullessness; it’s a designed object with a job. Mechanism, in the real world, is teleology with gears. Calling a person “mere mechanism” to deny purpose only works if you treat machines as self-acting lumps rather than artifacts built around intention.

Young’s intent is less to spiritualize humanity than to puncture sloppy materialism. He’s policing metaphors: you don’t get to smuggle a worldview in under the prestige of “science” while misunderstanding the technology you’re citing. The sting is in the implication that the anti-purpose argument is not hard-headed realism but a kind of armchair romanticism about cold, indifferent machines. In Young’s framing, machines don’t erase purpose; they are proof that purpose can be engineered.