AN OXFORD MAN AND AN INCH OF IRON
The whole process of machine-invention is itself the most colossal, spiritual achievement of history. The bare idea we have had of unravelling all creation, and of doing it up again to express our own souls—the idea of subduing matter, of making our ideals get their way with matter, with radium, ether, antiseptics, is itself a religion, a poetry, a ritual, a cry to heaven. The supreme, spiritual adventure of the world has become this task that man has set himself, of breaking down and casting away forever the idea that there is such a thing as matter belonging to matter—matter that keeps on in a dead, stupid way, just being matter. The idea that matter is not all alive with our souls, with our desires and prayers, with hope, terror, worship, with the little terrible wills of men and the spirit of God, is already irreligious to us. Is not every cubic inch of iron (the coldest-blooded scientist admits it) like a kind of little temple, its million million little atoms in it going round and round and round dancing before the Lord?
And why should an Oxford man be afraid of a cubic inch of iron, or afraid of becoming like it?
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.