e, terror, worship, with the
little terrible wills of men and the spirit of God, is already
irreligious to us. Is not every cubic inch of iron (the coldest-blooded
scientist admits it) like a kind of little temple, its million million
little atoms in it going round and round and round dancing before the
Lord?

And why should an Oxford man be afraid of a cubic inch of iron, or
afraid of becoming like it?

I daily thank God that I have been allowed to belong to this generation.
I have looked at last a little cubic inch of iron out of countenance. I
can sit and watch it, the little cubic inch of iron, in its still
coldness, in all its little funny play-deadness, and laugh! I know that
to a telescope or a god, or to me, to us, the little cubic inch of iron
is all alive inside, that it is whirling with will, that it is sensitive
in a rather dead-looking but lively cosmic way, sensitive like another
kind of more slowly quivering flesh, sensitive to moons and to stars
and to heat and cold, to time and space and to human souls. It is
singing every minute low and strange, night and day, in its little grim
blackness, of the glory of Things. I am filled with the same feeling,
the same sense of kindred, of triumphant companionship, when I go out
among them and watch the majestic family of the machines, of the
engines, those mighty Innocents, those new awful sons of God, going
abroad through all the world, looking back at us when we have made them,
unblinking and without sin!

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, o