into his new machines.  He converts heat into power, and power into light, and comes to live at last as almost any man of genius can really be seen living—­in a kind of transfigured or lighted-up body.  The poet transmutes his subconscious or machine body into words; and the artist, into colour or sound or into carved stone.  The engineer transmutes his subconscious body into long buildings, into aisles of windows, into stories of thoughtful machines.  Every great spiritual and imaginative genius is seen, sooner or later, to be the transmuted genius of some man’s body.  The things in Leonardo da Vinci that his unconscious, high-spirited, automatic senses gathered together for him, piled up in his mind for him, and handed over to him for the use of his soul, would have made a genius out of anybody.  It is not as if he had had to work out every day all the old details of being a genius, himself.

The miracles he seems to work are all made possible to him because of his thousand man-power, deep subconscious body, his tremendous factory of sensuous machinery.  It is as if he had practically a thousand men all working for him, for dear life, down in his basement, and the things that he can get these men to attend to for him give him a start with which none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete.  We call him inspired because he is more mechanical than we are, and because his real spiritual life begins where our lives leave off.

So the poets who have filled the world with glory and beauty have been free to do it because they have had more perfect, more healthful and improved subconscious senses handing up wonder to them than the rest of us have.

And so the engineers, living, as they always live, with that fierce, silent, implacable curiosity of theirs, woven through their bodies and through their senses and through their souls, have tagged the Creator’s footsteps under the earth, and along the sky, every now and then throwing up new little worlds to Him like His worlds, saying, “Look, O God, look at THIS!”—­the engineers whose poetry is too deep to look poetic have all done what they have done because the unconscious and automatic gifts of their senses, of the powers of their observation, have swung their souls free, given them long still reaches of thought and vast new orbits of desire, like gods.

All the great men of the world have always had machinery.

Now, everybody is having it.  The power to get little things, innumerable, omnipresent, for-ever-and-ever things, tiny just-so things, done for us automatically so that we can go on to our inspirations is no longer to-day the special prerogative of men of genius.  It is for all of us.  Machinery is the stored-up spirit, the old saved-up inspiration of the world turned on for every man.  And as the greatness of a man turns on his command over machinery, on his power to free his soul by making his body work for him, the greatness of a civilization turns upon its getting machines to do its work.  The more of our living we can learn to do to-day, automatically, the more inspired and creative and godlike and unmechanical our civilization becomes.