The painter learns how to adjust relations among things to release new perception, and the chemist and physicist learn how other relations release other kinds of power. Less and less, in the electric age, can we find any good reason for imposing the same set of relations on every kind of object or group of objects. Yet in the ancient w o r l d the only means of achieving power was getting a thousand slaves to act as one man. During the Middle Ages the communal clock extended b y the bell permitted high coordination of the energies of small communities. In the Renaissance the clock combined with the uniform respectability of the new typography to extend the power of social organization almost to a national scale.