ook in the eyes of it, haunting it,
gathering it all up, steel and thunder, into itself, catching it away
into heaven--was one of the most magical and stirring sights I have
seen for a long time. It came to me like a kind of Zeit-geist or
passing of the spirit of the age.

When I looked again it was old 992 from the roundhouse escorting
Number Eight to Springfield.

VI

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