People who do everything they do mechanically, or by machinery, are dead already.
It is bad enough for those of us who are trying to live our lives ourselves—real, true, hand-made individual lives—to have to fight all these machines about us trying daily to roar and roll us down into humdrum and nothingness, without having to fight besides all these dear people we have about us too, who have turned machines, even one's own flesh and blood. Does not one see them—see them everywhere—one's own flesh and blood, going about like stone-crushers, road-rollers, lifts, lawn-mowers?
Between the morbidly mechanical people and the morbidly unmechanical people, modern civilization hangs in the balance.
There must be some way of being just mechanical enough, and at the right time and right place, and of being just unmechanical enough at the right time and right place. And there must be some way in which men can be mechanical and unmechanical at will.
The fate of civilization turns on men who recognize the nature of machinery, who make machines serve them, who add the machines to their souls, like telephones and wireless telegraph, or to their bodies, like radium and railroads, and who know when and when not and how and how not to use them who are so used to using machines quietly and powerfully, that they do not let the machines outwit them and unman them.
Who are these men?
How do they do it?
They are the Machine-Trainers. The men who understand people-machines, who understand iron machines, and who understand how to make people-machines and iron machines run softly together.