Thus the opportunity to go forward might be lost in passion. The fate of retrogression is possible. This has happened many times. It is much less probable than ever before, however, for many reasons that seem permanent. When knowledge was a precious torch borne aloft by a few hands through storm and stress, it was easily quenched. Then darkness. You can hardly imagine destruction of the existing body of science, technology, and fact-knowledge. The mass of it is too great to be lost.
That, of course, has nothing to do with wisdom. By knowledge alone man might extinguish himself utterly. But to suppose that he will not find a new way to go on with, that he will either move the old struggle to new ground or return to medievalism, is to believe there is no law of human progress.
The probability is that he will find the way unknowingly, by groping, and will be well upon it before he has had time to formulate any clear idea or theory of what he is doing. He will have found little by little that it pays, better than any other way, not as he once understood profit, but in terms of enduring satisfactions, which may include peace. Critical understanding of it will come later with reflection, and as it comes he will rid his mind of the phantasy in pursuit of which he has made the world so much richer in things than in happiness.
Seeing now only how relentlessly the curse pursued him still and how the affliction of monotonous toil if it be lifted in one place is made heavier in another, he is torn with a sense of frustration. But the view is wrong—false to his first nature. He forgets the truth of his own myth. Somewhere down the ages it got turned upside down. Once he dwelt in the Garden of Eden, or supposed he did, and cared not for it. He was bored there and beguiled to his fall. The figure at the gate forbidding his return is a symbol of self-knowledge; it was set there by his own forethought, lest he should be tempted to go back.
If the machine with which he has believed himself to be storming a childish wish ever brought him to a state of effortless ease on earth, that would be his last.
It may be a power he is yet morally unprepared to exercise. How strange at least that with an incentive so trivial and naïve in itself he should have been able to perform an absolute feat of creation!
The machine was not. He reached his mind into emptiness and seized it. Even yet he cannot realize what he has done. Out of the free elemental stuff of the universe, visible and invisible, some of it imponderable, such as lightning, he has invented a class of typhonic, mindless organisms, exempt from the will of nature.
We have no understanding of creation, its process or meaning. The machine is the externalized image of man’s thoughts. It is furthermore an extension of his life, for we perceive as an economic fact that human existence in its present phase, on its present scale, could not continue in its absence. And what are we ourselves, life to begin with, if not an image of thought? Perhaps it is true as a principle of creation that the image and its creator must co-exist, inseparably.
In any light, man’s further task is Jovian. That is to learn how best to live with these powerful creatures of his mind, how to give their fecundity a law and their functions a rhythm, how not to employ them in error against himself—since he cannot live without them.
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