So the old slogan “man against nature” really amounts to economic elites against nature. Railroads were demanded by elites, and hence, built by elites. Man should be qualified, for it is a label that hide more than it reveals. Railroads conquered perception, something far more intimate than man’s relationship to matter. The nature of this shift is the thesis of this book. Hence, the conquest of time and space is a qualitative distinction from science’s conquest of matter, a conquest still taking place. This is what makes the railway unique, it is what gives rail travel a philosophical and epistemological value not lost on such writers as Leo Tolstoy. The conquest of matter is a long standing aim of the natural sciences, but the conquest of time and space is the domination of the inner man, the very nature of perception. It was one thing to want to conquer the world of matter, quite another to conquer the conditions under which matter appears. More specifically, it was a conquest of something more than nature, but the forms under which nature appears, that os time and space. Railroads were a symbol: they were a symbol of the industrial revolution, but, most important of all, it was a symbol of man’s conquest of nature. Efficiency is easy to quantify, the way of life destroyed by such monoliths is not measurable and hence, given modernity’s obsession with measurement, easier to ignore. Established opinion stresses the efficiency and progress that such travel engendered, but the more or less non-quantifiable things that were lost or damaged is something else entirely. The railway revolutionized England, America and all Europe.
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