a kind of new, stern gladness, implacableness, and hope, have appointed
to their souls expression through machinery. Our Engines and our radium
shall cry to God! Our wheels sing in the sun!

Machinery is our new art-form. A man expresses himself first in his
hands and feet, then in his clothes, and then in his rooms or in his
house, and then on the ground about him; the very hills grow like him,
and the ground in the fields becomes his countenance; and now, last and
furthest of all, requiring the liveliest and noblest grasp of his soul,
the finest circulation of will of all, he begins expressing himself in
his vast machines, in his three-thousand-mile railways, in his vast,
cold-looking looms and dull steel hammers. With telescopes for Mars-eyes
for his spirit, he walks up the skies; he expresses his soul in deep and
dark mines, and in mighty foundries melting and re-moulding the world.
He is making these things intimate, sensitive, and colossal expressions
of his soul. They have become the subconscious body, the abysmal,
semi-infinite body of the man, sacred as the body of the man is sacred,
and as full of light or of darkness.

So I have seen the machines go swinging through the world. Like
archangels, like demons, they mount up our desires on the mountains. We
do as we will with them. We build Winchester Cathedral all over again,
on water. We dive down with our steel wheels and nose for
knowledge--like a great Fish--along the bottom of the sea. We beat up
our wills through the air. We fling up, with our religion, with our
faith, our bodies on the clouds. We fly reverently and strangely, our
hearts all still and happy, in the face of God!

CHAPTER V

AN OXFORD MAN AND AN INCH OF IRON

The whole process of machine-invention is itself the most colossal,
spiritual achievement of history. The bare idea we have had of
unravelling all creation, and of doing it up again to express our own
souls--the idea of subduing matter, of making our ideals get their way
with matter, with radium, ether, antiseptics, is itself a religion, a
poetry, a ritual, a cry to heaven. The supreme, spiritual adventure of
the world has become this task that man has set himself, of breaking
down and casting away forever the idea that there is such a thing as
matter belonging to matter--matter that keeps on in a dead, stupid way,
just being matter. The idea that matter is not all alive with our souls,
with our desires and prayers, with hop