THE MACHINES AS PHILOSOPHERS
If we could go into History as we go into a theatre, take our seats quietly, ring up the vast curtain on any generation we liked, and then could watch it—all those far off queer happy people living before our eyes, two or three hours—living with their new inventions and their last wonders all about them, they would not seem to us, probably to know why they were happy. They would merely be living along with their new things from day to day, in a kind of secret clumsy gladness.
Perhaps it is the same with us. The theories for poems have to be arranged after we have had them. The fundamental appeal of machinery seems to be to every man’s personal everyday instinct and experience. We have, most of the time, neither words nor theories for it.
I do not think that our case must stand or fall with our theory. But there is something comfortable about a theory. A theory gives one permission to let ones self go—makes it seem more respectable to enjoy things. So I suggest something—the one I have used when I felt I had to have one. I have partitioned it off by itself and it can be skipped.
1. The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.
2. A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals the nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.
3. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately expressed.
4. Machinery has poetry in it because the three immeasurable ideas expressed by machinery are the three immeasurable ideas of poetry and of the imagination and the soul—infinity and the two forms of infinity, the liberty and the unity of man.
5. These immeasurable ideas are consummately expressed by machinery because machinery expresses them in the only way that immeasurable ideas can ever be expressed: (1) by literally doing the immeasurable things, (2) by suggesting that it is doing them. To the man who is in the mood of looking at it with his whole being, the machine is beautiful because it is the mightiest and silentest symbol the world contains of the infinity of his own life, and of the liberty and unity of all men’s lives, which slowly, out of the passion of history is now being wrought out before our eyes upon the face of the earth.