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By Root 1995 0

tended not to work when it came to facts that Christians had been told to discount, like that of a continuity between animals and humans; they clung to a conviction that "some unseen, unknown Cause" would appear in the end and "at once confute it all." Exactly the same problem plagued attempts to demonstrate perpetual motion experimentally-witnesses convinced beforehand of its impossibility would refuse to believe their eyes. And he prefaced his account of the rotator with a violent attack on "philosophical criticks" who banded together to reinforce such complacencies, reprinting his tracts at length in order to ridicule them. This was business as usual in the republic of letters, Kenrick sighed; the natural state of that republic was a civil war fought by "pirates by profession."77

In Kenrick's view, Donaldson v. Becket mattered because it finally made apparent this shared plight of the Grub Street author and the projecting inventor. "The inventor of a machine, or art useful in life," he noted, "is now almost universally admitted to stand precisely on the same footing with the author of a book." This was what the long conflict had achieved. And it had the effect of making visible for the first time two problems that impeded progress itself. First, "artists" had no such principle as copyright to protect their interests. They still had to seek patents individually-a time-consuming, costly, and uncertain business. Kenrick therefore urged that a counterpart to copyright be inaugurated for inventors. This would have major social advantages, he thought. By awakening "the curiosity of Genius" and the "spirit of enterprize," it would clarify a natural and proper distinction between the "inventive artificer" and the "uninventive artisan" -those qualified to employ others versus those capable only of working themselves. Recognizing the incipient formation of classes around properties meant, he urged, doing something that nobody had seriously proposed before because it would mean scrapping the relevant clause of the 1624 Statute of Monopolies. Kenrick explicitly welcomed that prospect. It would restore to the state the power to patronize ingenuity, and rectify what had in any case been a category mistake, for properties in inventions were not truly monopolies. Far from resurrecting monopolies, his change would help destroy the real combinations that were rife in his own society, like that of the booksellers 78 In short, a copyright system for inventions would underwrite industrial progress.

The second plight that Kenrick felt the 1774 result highlighted was that of unoriginal authors. The previous generation had seen a wealth of debate about original authorship, but almost none (sardonic remarks excepted) about what, after all, amounted to the vast majority of published writing. Kenrick pointed out that the practice of getting injunctions against "pretended pirates" had been used repeatedly against works of compilation. If perpetual copyright did not exist, however, then this tactic became suddenly untenable, because the Statute of 1710 nowhere outlawed these practices. As the Scottish jurist Monboddo had noticed, the Act ofAnne forbade only "the mere mechanical operation of printing, without any labour of the mind"; it said nothing against exercising "memory or judgment" upon the original. This mattered enormously. Recycling was, in Kenrick's view, the central reality of eighteenth-century publishing, and therefore of enlightenment. Abstracts, abridgments, epitomes, translations, and compilations were the vast preponderance of the new books published every year. Five hundred "copyists and compilers" existed for every one original author. Moreover, their number necessarily increased as the number of books multiplied, providing ever more fodder for regurgitation. And this-not isolated, heroic creation-was where knowledge and progress truly arose. So the world of printed knowledge was itself a perpetual motion machine, with the power to cycle indefinitely like a commercial-literary counterpart to Kenrick's rotator. That perpetuity