ey are really for, and how they
work--who know what people-machines really are, and what they are really
for, and how they work. They will base all that they do upon certain
resemblances and certain differences between people and machines.

They will work the machines of iron according to the laws of iron.

They will work the machines of men according to the laws of human
nature.

There are certain facts in human nature, feelings, enthusiasms and
general principles concerning the natural working relation between men
and machines, that it may be well to consider in the next chapter as a
basis for a possible solution.

What are our machines after all? How are the machines like us? And on
what theory of their relation to us can machines and men expect in a
world like this to run softly together? These are the questions men are
going to answer next. In the meantime, I venture to believe that no man
who is morose to-day about the machines, or who is afraid of machines in
our civilization--because they are machines--is likely to be able to do
much to save the men in it.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BASEMENT OF THE WORLD

Every man has, according to the scientists, a place in the small of his
back which might be called roughly, perhaps, the soul of his body. All
the little streets of the senses or avenues of knowledge, the spiritual
conduits through which he lives in this world, meet in this little
mighty brain in the small of a man's back.

About nine hundred millions of his grandfathers apparently make their
headquarters in this little place in the small of his back.

It is in this one little modest unnoticed place that he is supposed to
keep his race-consciousness, his subconscious memory of a whole human
race, and it is here that the desires and the delights and labours of
thousands of years of other people are turned off and turned on in him.
It is the brain that has been given to every man for the heavy everyday
hard work of living. The other brain, the one with which he does his
thinking and which is kept in an honoured place up in the cupola of his
being, is a comparatively light-working organ, merely his own private
personal brain--a conscious, small, and supposably controllable affair.
He holds on to his own particular identity with it. The great lower
brain in the small of his back is merely lent to him, as it were, out of
eternity--while he goes by.

It is like a great engine which he has been allowed the