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.

6. It is only from the point of view of a nightingale or a sonnet that
the aesthetic form of a machine, if it is a good machine, can be
criticised as unbeautiful. The less forms dealing with immeasurable
ideas are finished forms the more symbolic and speechless they are;
the more they invoke the imagination and make it build out on God, and
upon the Future, and upon Silence, the more artistic and beautiful and
satisfying they are.

7. The first great artist a modern or machine age can have, will be
the man who brings out for it the ideas behind its machines. These
ideas--the ones the machines are daily playing over and about the
lives of all of us--might be stated roughly as follows:

The idea of the incarnation--the god in the body of the man.
The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from others.
The idea of unity--the soul's rescue from its mere self.
The idea of the Spirit--the Unseen and Intangible.
The idea of immortality.
The cosmic idea of God.
The practical idea of invoking great men.
The religious idea of love and comradeship.

And nearly every other idea that makes of itself a song or a prayer in
the human spirit.

PART FOUR

IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES

I

THE IDEA OF INCARNATION

"_I sought myself through earth and fire and seas,

And found it not--but many things beside;
Behemoth old, Leviathans that ride.
And protoplasm, and jellies of the tide.

Then wandering upward through the solid earth
With its dim sounds, potential rage and mirth,
I faced the dim Forefather of my birth,

And thus addressed Him: 'All of you that lie
Safe in the dust or ride along the sky--
Lo, these and these and these! But where am I?_'"

The grasshopper may be called the poet of the insects. He has more hop
for his size than any of the others. I am very fond of watching
him--especially of watching those two enormous beams of his that loom
up on either side of his body. They have always seemed to me one of
the great marvels of mechanics. By knowing how to use them, he jumps
forty times his own length. A man who could contrive to walk as well
as any ordinary grasshopper does (and without half trying) could make
two hundred and fifty feet at a step. There is no denying, of course,
that the