单项选择题
| The Greek’s lofty attitude toward
scientific research and the scientists’ contempt of utility was a long time
dying. For a millennium after Archimedes, this separation of mechanics from
geometry inhibited fundamental technological progress and in some areas
repressed it altogether. But there was a still greater obstacle to change until
the very end of the middle ages: the organization of society. The social system
of fixed class relationships that prevailed through the Middle Ages (and in some
areas much longer) itself hampered improvement. Under this system, the
laboring masses, in exchange for the bare necessities of life, did all the
productive work, while the privileged few--priests, nobles, and kings--concerned
themselves only with ownership and maintenance of their own position. In
the interest of their privileges they did achieve considerable progress in
defense, in warmaking, in government, in trade, in the arts of leisure, and in
the extraction of labor from their dependents, but they had no familiarity with
the process of production. On the other hand, the laborers, who were familiar
with manufacturing techniques, had no incentive to improve or increase
production to the advantage of their masters. Thus, with one class possessing
the requisite knowledge aid experience, but lacking incentive and leisure, and
the other class lacking the knowledge and experience, there was no means by
which technical progress could be achieved. The whole ancient world was built upon this relationship--a relationship as sterile as it was inhuman. The availability of slaves nullified the need for more efficient machinery. In many of the commonplace fields of human endeavor, actual stagnation prevailed for thousands of years. Not all the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome could develop the windmill or contrive so simple an instrument as the wheelbarrow--products of the tenth and thirteenth centuries respectively. For about twenty-five centuries, two-thirds of the power of the horse was lost because he wasn’t shod, and much of the strength of the ox was wasted because his harness wasn’t modified to fit his shoulders. For more than five thousand years, sailors were confined to rivers and coasts by a primitive steering mechanism which required remarkably little alteration (in the thirteenth century) to become a rudder. With any ingenuity at all, the ancient plough could have been put on wheels and the ploughshare shaped to bite and turn the sod instead of merely scratching it but the ingenuity wasn’t forthcoming. And the villager of the Middle Ages, like the men who first had fire, had a smoke hole in the center of the straw and reed thatched roof of his one-room dwelling (which he shared with his animals), while the medieval charcoal burner (like his Stone Age ancestor) made himself a hut of small branches. |