The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed, however, an increasing struggle over the

connotations of the root metaphor-“mechanists”using it with approval and extending its applications
form nature to society,romantics rejecting its appropriateness in deiverse contexts. In 1832, for
example, an American mathematis teacher (later lawyer) named Timothy Walker (1802-1856) took it
upon himself fto respond Thomas Carlyle’s criricsm of mechanics in Signs of the Times (1829).
Walker did not fully appreciate Carlyle’s contrast between mechanics and dynamics as poles of
human action and feeling, nor could he have anticipated Carlyle’s subsequent call for erintegration
of dynamics with mechanics by “Captain of Industry”(past and present, 1843) instead, walker’s
“Defense of mechanical Philosphy” makes the characteristic argument that mechanical philosophy is
the true means for emancipating the human mind in both thought and practice, and that trough its
correlate,technology, it makes democratically available the kind of freedom enjyed only by the few
in a society base on slavery

Two years Later, in 1835, the Scottish chemical engineer Andrew Ure (1778-1857) coined the
phrase “Philosophy of manufatures” to the designate his “ exposition of the general principles on
which productive industry should be conducted with self-acting machines,’’ which he contrancts to
‘’the philosophy of the fine arts” Ure’s exposition includes a number of conceptual issues that he
continued to concern the philosophy of technology: distinctions between craft and factory
production, mechanical and chemical processes, the classification of machines, the possibility of
rules for invention, and the socioeconomic implications of ‘’automatic machinery’’.