Essential McLuhan 96 manufacture, like a cake. The word atom or electron is not used as the name of a piece. It is used as part of the description of the observations of physicists. It has no meaning except as used by people who know the experiments by which it is revealed. And, he adds, “it is important to realize that great changes in ways of ordinary human speaking and acting are bound up with the adoption of new instruments.” Had we meditated on such a basic fact as that long ago, we might easily have mastered the nature and effects of all our technologies, instead of being pushed around by them. At any rate, The Gutenberg Galaxy is a prolonged meditation on that theme of J.Z.Young. Nobody has been more conscious of the futility of our closed systems of historical writing than Abbot Payson Usher. His classic, A History of Mechanical Inventions, is an explanation of why such closed systems cannot make contact with the facts of historical change: “The cultures of antiquity do not fit the patterns of the linear sequences of social and economic evolution developed by the German Historical Schools…. If linear concepts of development are abandoned and the development of civilization is viewed frankly as a multilinear process much can be done toward the understanding of the history of Western culture as a progressive integration of many separate elements” (pp. 30–1). A historical “point of view” is a kind of closed system that is closely related to typography, and flourishes where the unconscious effects of literacy flourish without countervailing cultural forces. Alexis de Tocqueville, whose literacy was much modified by his oral culture, seems to us now to have had a kind of clairvoyance concerning the patterns of change in the France and America of his time. He did not have a point of view, a fixed position from which he filled in a visual perspective of events. Rather he sought the operative dynamic in his data: But if I go further and seek among these characteristics the principal one, which includes almost all the rest, I discover that in most of the operations of the mind each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding. America is therefore one of the countries where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and are best applied…. Everyone shuts himself tightly up within himself and insists upon judging the world from there.5 His skill in creating interplay between the written and oral modes of perceptual structure enabled de Tocqueville to achieve “scientific” insights into psychology and politics. By this interplay of two modes of perception he achieved prophetic understanding while other observers