I daily thank God that I have been allowed to belong to this generation.  I have looked at last a little cubic inch of iron out of countenance.  I can sit and watch it, the little cubic inch of iron, in its still coldness, in all its little funny play-deadness, and laugh!  I know that to a telescope or a god, or to me, to us, the little cubic inch of iron is all alive inside, that it is whirling with will, that it is sensitive in a rather dead-looking but lively cosmic way, sensitive like another kind of more slowly quivering flesh, sensitive to moons and to stars and to heat and cold, to time and space and to human souls.  It is singing every minute low and strange, night and day, in its little grim blackness, of the glory of Things.  I am filled with the same feeling, the same sense of kindred, of triumphant companionship, when I go out among them and watch the majestic family of the machines, of the engines, those mighty Innocents, those new awful sons of God, going abroad through all the world, looking back at us when we have made them, unblinking and without sin!

Like rain and sunshine, like chemicals, and like all the other innocent, godlike things, and like waves of water and waves of air, rainbows, starlight, they say what we make them say.  They are alive with the life that is in us.

The first element of power in a man, in getting control of his life in our modern era, is to have spirit enough to know what matter is like.

The Machine-Trainer is the man who sees what the machines are like.  He is the man who conceives of iron-and-wood machines, in his daily habit of thought, as alive.  He has discovered ways in which he can produce an impression upon iron and wood with his desires, and with his will.  He goes about making iron-and-wood machines do live things.

It is never the machines that are dead.

It is only mechanical-minded men that are dead.

CHAPTER VI

THE MACHINES’ MACHINES

The fate of civilization is not going to be determined by people who are morbidly like machines on the one hand, or by people who are morbidly unmechanical, on the other.

People in a machine civilization who try to live without being automatic and mechanical-minded part of the time and in some things, people who try to make everything they do artistic and self-expressive and hand-made, who attend to all their own thoughts and finish off all their actions by hand themselves, soon wish they were dead.

People who do everything they do mechanically, or by machinery, are dead already.

It is bad enough for those of us who are trying to live our lives ourselves—­real, true, hand-made individual lives—­to have to fight all these machines about us trying daily to roar and roll us down into humdrum and nothingness, without having to fight besides all these dear people we have about us too, who have turned machines, even one’s own flesh and blood.  Does not one see them—­see them everywhere—­one’s own flesh and blood, going about like stone-crushers, road-rollers, lifts, lawn-mowers?