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.