Either the machine has a meaning to life that we have not yet been able to interpret in a rational manner or it is itself a manifestation of life and therefore mysterious. We have seen it grow. We know it to be the exterior reality of our own ideas. Thus we are very familiar with it, as with our arms and legs, and see it in much the same way—that is to say, imperfectly and in some aspects not at all. Certainly it would look very different if for a moment we could see it from an original point of view with the eye of new wonder.
Fancy yourself a planetary tourist come visiting here, knowing beforehand neither God nor man, unable therefore to distinguish intuitively between their works.
Would you not think the machine that spins silk threads by the ton from cellulose more wonderful than the silkworm similarly converting the mulberry leaf in precious quantities, or a steel ship more amazing than a whale? What of the mechanical beast with a colorless fluid in its tail and a flame in its nose that runs sixty miles an hour without weariness? Would it not seem superior in many ways to the horse that goes forty miles in a day and falls down?
Suppose, moreover, that you know the tongue of men and are able to ask them questions. You ask particularly about the automobile, which you have mentally compared with the horse; whereupon they take you to the factories in Detroit to see the automobile in process of becoming, under conditions of mass-production, two or three taking life with a snort every minute. In this factory, they tell you, they make only one hundred a day, very fine ones; but in another they make five hundred, and in another five thousand a day.
You ask them who makes the horse.
They do not know. They teach their children to say God makes it. The horse is a natural thing.
Then the automobile is an unnatural thing?
They say no, smiling a little. Not an unnatural thing. The automobile is a mechanical thing because they make it themselves.
You ask them why they say they make it.
At this they are distressed. There has been some slip of understanding in the use of language. They explain it carefully. The horse is born. There is no horse-factory. The automobile is made, as you have seen, in factories.