Literary notes about mechanical (AI summary)
Writers employ "mechanical" to evoke a sense of rigidity, automation, and impersonal routine in both human behavior and natural phenomena. In some texts, the term underscores actions performed with an inhuman regularity or detached precision—as when observations are recorded in a rote, uninspired manner [1] or when a smile, void of true feeling, is described as mechanical [2, 3]. At the same time, "mechanical" can denote strict adherence to rules and processes, whether in architecture [4] or in the methodical operations of machinery and mind [5, 6]. This layered use highlights a contrast between organic spontaneity and the cold, systematic order characteristic of mechanical functions, reflecting contemporary concerns with both the dehumanizing aspects of modernity and the loss of creative freedom [7, 8].
- I have only been able to make out one or two fugitive observations, jotted down in a mere mechanical way.
— from A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne - This mechanical smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth rather than the soul.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo - His face was all the time fixed and stiff and colourless, his life was a dry, mechanical movement.
— from The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence - The practice of architecture is directed by a few general and even mechanical rules.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon - that of final causes, but yet without prejudice to the principle of mechanical causality.
— from Kant's Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant - Then it operates to call out mechanical reactions, ability to use the vocal organs to repeat statements, or the hand to write or to do "sums.
— from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey - The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless.
— from The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer - It makes instruction and learning formal, mechanical, constrained.
— from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey
