ABSTRACT
In 1854 Herman Melville was living in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Melville's personal sense of depression made him more acutely sensitive to certain human problems than his contemporaries and gave his observations special value. Accordingly, Melville's contemporaries also regarded the machine as humanity's emancipator, as Etienne Cabet had suggested it would be in Voyage en Icarie. In Melville's day there had still been no sharp distinction between the scientists and others or between science and other kinds of learning. Popular science was not always less correct, by later standards, than official science. Popular science, in other words, was magic. The men and women who moved into the highly complex and technically elaborate industrial society simply assimilated the phenomena about them in terms of the one explanatory category they already knew, that of magic. A modern version of one of the seminal human myths foreshadowed the complex relations among man, magic, and the machine.
