tacit at best and is commonly
veiled by some more or less transparent fiction.

And our suspicion of fallacy lurking somewhere in the type of
retrospective Idealism we have been considering is strengthened when we
come to look a little closely to details. To take a commonplace
example--can it be held that the difference between using a typewriter
and "writing by hand" is purely and simply a matter of degree--that the
machine serves the same purpose and accomplishes the same _kind_ of
result as the pen, but simply does the work more easily, rapidly, and
neatly? Undoubtedly some such impression may easily be gathered from an
external survey of the ways that men have used at different times for
putting their ideas on record. But it ignores important aspects of the
case. For one thing, the modern invention effects a saving of the
writer's time which can be used in further investigation or in more
careful revision or in some way wholly unrelated to literary work, and
if the machine makes any part of the writer's task less irksome, or the
task as a whole less engrossing, the whole matter of literary effort
becomes less forbidding and its place and influence as a social or a
personal function may for better or for worse be altered. The difference
brought to pass transcends mere technical facility--it ramifies into a
manifold of differences affecting the entire qualitative character and
meaning of the literary function. And only by an arbitrary
sophistication of the facts can this complexity of new outcome be
thought of as implicit and dynamic in the earlier stage.

In the same way precisely, the motor-car, as every one knows, has
"vanquished distance" and has "revolutionized suburban life." In England
it is said to have made acute the issue of plural voting. In America it
is hailed by the optimistic as the solution of the vexed problem of
urban concentration and the decline of agriculture. Even as a means of
recreation it is said by the initiated to transform the whole meaning of
one's physical environment, exploiting new values in sky and air and the
green earth, which pass the utmost possibilities of family "carry-all"
or coach and four. Or consider the ocean steamship and its influence:
today we travel freely over the world, for all manner of reasons,
sufficient or otherwise. A hundred years ago distant journeyings by sea
or land were arduous and full of peril, undertaken only by the most
adventurous or the most curious or