The more a human being develops, the more delicate, sensitive, strong, and efficient, the more spirit-informed once for all the machines in the bas.e.m.e.nt are. As he grows, the various subconscious arrangements for discriminating, a.s.similating and cla.s.sifying material, for pumping up power, light, and heat to headquarters, all of which can be turned on at will, grow more masterful every year. They are found all slaving away for him dimly down in the dark while he sleeps. They hand him up in his very dreams new and strange powers to live and know with.
The men who have been the most developed of all, in this regard, civilization has always selected and set apart from the others. It calls these men, in their generation, men of genius.
Ordinary men do not try to compete with men of genius.
The reason that people set the genius apart and do not try to compete with him is that he has more and better machinery than they have. It is always the first thing one notices about a man of genius--the incredible number of things that he manages to get done for him, apparently the things that he never takes any time off, like the rest of us, to do himself. The subconscious, automatic, mechanical equipment of his senses, the extraordinary intelligence and refinement of his body, the way his senses keep his spirit informed automatically and convey outer knowledge to him, the power he has in return of informing this outer knowledge with his spirit, with his will, with his choices, once for all, so that he is always able afterward to rely on his senses to work out things beautifully for him quite by themselves, and to hand up to him, when he wants them, rare, deep, unconscious knowledge--all the things he wants to use for what his soul is doing at the moment--it is these that make the man of genius what he is. He has a larger and better factory than others, and has developed a huge subconscious service in mind and body. Having all these things done for him, he is naturally more free than others and has more vision and more originality, his spirit is swung free to build new worlds--to take walks with G.o.d, until at last we come to look upon him, upon the man of genius, a little superst.i.tiously.
We look up every little while from doing the things ourselves that he gets done for him by his subconscious machinery, and we wonder at him, we wonder at the strange, the mighty feats he does, at his thousand-leagued boots, at his apparent everywhereness. His songs and joys, sometimes, to us, his very sorrows, look miraculous.
And yet it is all merely because he has a factory, a great automatic equipment, a thousand employee-sense perceptions, down in the bas.e.m.e.nt of his being, doing things for him that the rest of us do, or think we are obliged to do ourselves, and give up all of our time to. He is not held back as we are, and moves freely. So he dives under the sea familiarly, or takes peeps at the farther side of the stars, or he flies in the air, or he builds unspeakable railroads or thinks out ships or sea-cities, or he builds books, or he builds little new still-undreamed-of worlds out of chemistry, or he unravels history out of rocks, or plants new cities and mighty states without seeming to try, or perhaps he proceeds quietly to be interested in men, in all these funny little dots of men about him; and out of the earth and sky, out of the same old earth and sky everybody else had had, he makes new kinds and new sizes of men with a thought like some mighty, serene child playing with dolls!
It is generally supposed that the man of genius rules history and dictates the ideals, the activities of the next generation, writes out the specifications for the joys and sorrows of a world, and lays the ground-plans of nations because he has an inspired mind. It is really because he has an inspired body, a body that has received its orders once for all, from his spirit. We would never wonder that everything a genius does has that vivid and strange reality it has, if we realized what his body is doing for him, how he has a body which is at work automatically drinking up the earth into everything he thinks, drinking up practicability, art and technique for him into everything he sees and everything he hopes and desires. And every year he keeps on adding a new body, keeps on handing down to his bas.e.m.e.nt new sets, every day, of finer and yet finer things to do automatically. The great spiritual genius becomes great by economizing his consciousness in one direction and letting it fare forth in another. He converts his old inspirations into his new machines. He converts heat into power, and power into light, and comes to live at last as almost any man of genius can really be seen living--in a kind of transfigured or lighted-up body. The poet trans.m.u.tes his subconscious or machine body into words; and the artist, into colour or sound or into carved stone. The engineer trans.m.u.tes his subconscious body into long buildings, into aisles of windows, into stories of thoughtful machines. Every great spiritual and imaginative genius is seen, sooner or later, to be the trans.m.u.ted genius of some man"s body. The things in Leonardo da Vinci that his unconscious, high-spirited, automatic senses gathered together for him, piled up in his mind for him, and handed over to him for the use of his soul, would have made a genius out of anybody. It is not as if he had had to work out every day all the old details of being a genius, himself.
The miracles he seems to work are all made possible to him because of his thousand man-power, deep subconscious body, his tremendous factory of sensuous machinery. It is as if he had practically a thousand men all working for him, for dear life, down in his bas.e.m.e.nt, and the things that he can get these men to attend to for him give him a start with which none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete. We call him inspired because he is more mechanical than we are, and because his real spiritual life begins where our lives leave off.
So the poets who have filled the world with glory and beauty have been free to do it because they have had more perfect, more healthful and improved subconscious senses handing up wonder to them than the rest of us have.
And so the engineers, living, as they always live, with that fierce, silent, implacable curiosity of theirs, woven through their bodies and through their senses and through their souls, have tagged the Creator"s footsteps under the earth, and along the sky, every now and then throwing up new little worlds to Him like His worlds, saying, "Look, O G.o.d, look at THIS!"--the engineers whose poetry is too deep to look poetic have all done what they have done because the unconscious and automatic gifts of their senses, of the powers of their observation, have swung their souls free, given them long still reaches of thought and vast new orbits of desire, like G.o.ds.
All the great men of the world have always had machinery.
Now, everybody is having it. The power to get little things, innumerable, omnipresent, for-ever-and-ever things, tiny just-so things, done for us automatically so that we can go on to our inspirations is no longer to-day the special prerogative of men of genius. It is for all of us. Machinery is the stored-up spirit, the old saved-up inspiration of the world turned on for every man. And as the greatness of a man turns on his command over machinery, on his power to free his soul by making his body work for him, the greatness of a civilization turns upon its getting machines to do its work. The more of our living we can learn to do to-day, automatically, the more inspired and creative and G.o.dlike and unmechanical our civilization becomes.
Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.
CHAPTER IX
THE GROUND FLOOR FOLKS
I would not have, if I could afford it, a thing in my house that is not hand-made. I have come to believe that machinery is going to make it possible for everybody to have hand-made things in their homes, things that have been made by people who love to make them, and by people who, thinks to the machines, are soon bound to have time to make them. Some will have gifts for hand-made furniture, others for hand-made ideas.
Perhaps people will even have time for sitting down to enjoy hand-made ideas, to enjoy hand-made books--and enjoy reading books by hand. We may have time for following an author in a book in the slow, old, deep, loving, happy, hand-made fashion we used to know--when we have enough machines.
It looks as if it might be something like this.
Every man is going to spend his mornings in the bas.e.m.e.nt of society, taking orders and being a servant and executing automatically, like a machine if need be, the will of the world, making what the world wants in the way it wants it, expressing society and subordinating himself. In the afternoon he shall come up out of the bas.e.m.e.nt, and take his stand on the ground floor of the world, stop being a part of the machinery, and be a man, express himself and give orders to himself and do some work he loves to do in the way he loves to do it, express his soul in his labour, and be an artist. He will not select his work in the morning, or select his employer, or say how the work shall be done. He will himself be selected, like a young tree or like an iron nail, because he is the best made and best fitted thing at hand to be used in a certain place and in a certain way.
When the man has been selected for his latent capacities, his employer sets to work on him scientifically and according to the laws of physics, hygiene, conservation of energy, the laws of philosophy, human nature, heredity, psychology, and even metaphysics, teaches the man how to hold his hands, how to lift, how to sit down, how to rest, and how to breathe, so that three times as much work can be got out of him as he could get out of himself. A mind of the highest rank and, if necessary, thirty minds of the highest rank, shall be at his disposal, shall be lent him to show him how his work can be done. The acc.u.mulated science and genius, the imagination and experience, of hundreds of years, of all climates, of all countries, of all temperaments shall be heaped up by his employers, gathered about the man"s mind, wrought through his limbs, and help him to do his work.
All labour down in the bas.e.m.e.nt of society shall be skilled labour. The brains of men of genius and of experts shall be pumped into labour from above until every man in the bas.e.m.e.nt shall earn as much money in three hours a day as he formerly had earned in nine.
Between the time a man saves by having machinery and the time he saves by having the brains of great men and geniuses to work with, it will be possible for men to do enough work for other people down in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the world in a few hours to shut the whole bas.e.m.e.nt up, if we want to, by three o"clock. Every man who is fit for it shall spend the rest of his time in planning his work himself and in expressing himself, and in creating hand-made and beautiful, inspired and wilful things like an artist, or like a slowed-down genius, or at least like a man or like a human being.
Every man owes it to society to spend part of his time in expressing his own soul. The world needs him. Society cannot afford to let him merely give to it his feet and his hands. It wants the joy in him, the creative desire in him, the slow, stupid, hopeful initiative, in him to help run the world. Society wants to use the man"s soul too--the man"s will. It is going to demand the soul in a man, the essence or good-will in him, if only to protect itself, and to keep the man from being dangerous. Men who have lost or suppressed their souls, and who go about cursing at the world every day they live in it, are not a safe, social investment.
But while every man is going to see that he owes it to society to use a part of his time in it in expressing himself, his own desires, in his own way, he is going to see also that he owes it to society to spend part of his time in expressing others and in expressing the desires and the needs of others. The two processes could be best effected at first probably by alternating, by keeping the man in equilibrium, balancing the mechanical and the spiritual in his life. Eventually and ideally, he will manage to have time in a higher state of society to put them together, to express in the same act at the same time, and not alternating or reciprocally, himself and others. And he will succeed in doing what the great and free artist does already. He will make his individual self-expression so great and so generous that it is also the expression of the universal self. Every man will be treated according to his own nature. Doubtless some men have not brains enough in a week to supply them for one hour a day of self-directed work. It would take them five hours a day to think how to do one hour"s worth of work. Men who prefer, as many will, not to think, and who like the bas.e.m.e.nt better, can subst.i.tute in the bas.e.m.e.nt for their sons, and buy if they like, the freedom of sons who prefer thinking, who would like to work harder than their fathers would care to work, up on the ground floor of the world.
But as time goes on, it is to be hoped that every man will climb up slowly, and will belong less and less of his time to the staff that borrows brains, and more and more of his time to the staff that hands brains down, and that directs the machinery of the world. The time of alternation in dealing with different callings will probably be adjusted differently, and might be made weeks instead of days, but the principle would be the same. The forces that are going to help, apparently, in this evolution will be the labour exchange--the centre for the mobilization of labour, the produce exchange, the inventor"s spirit in the labour unions and employers" a.s.sociations, and the gradual organization by inventors of the common vision of all men, and setting it at work on the supreme task of modern life--the task of drawing out, evoking each particular man in the world, and in behalf of all, freeing him for his own particular place.
CHAPTER X
THE MACHINE-TRAINERS
The fundamental failure of humanity so far is in self-a.s.sertion.
The essential distinctive trait of modern civilization is machinery.
Machinery logically and irrevocably involves the cooperative action of individuals.
If we make levers and iron wheels work by putting them together according to their nature, we can only make vast ma.s.ses of men work by putting them together according to their nature.
So far we have been trying to make vast ma.s.ses of men work together in precisely the same way we make levers and iron wheels work together. We have thought we could make diabolically, foolishly, insanely inflexible men-machines which violate at every point the natural qualities and instincts of the materials of which they are made.
We have failed to a.s.sert ourselves against our iron machines. We have let our iron machines a.s.sert themselves against us. We have let our iron machines be models for us. We have overlooked the difference in the nature of the materials in machines of iron and machines of men.
A man is a self-reproducing machine, and an iron machine is one that has to be reproduced by somebody else.
In a man-machine arrangements must be made so that each man can be allowed to be the father of his own children and the author of his own acts.
In society or the man-machine, if it is to work, men are individuals.
Society is organically, irrevocably dependent upon each man, and upon what each man chooses according to his own nature to do himself.
The result is, the first principle of success in constructing and running a social machine is to ask and to get an answer out of each man who is, as we look him over and take him up, and propose to put him into it, "What are you like?" "What are you especially for?" "What do you want?" "How can you get it?"
Our success in getting him properly into our machine turns upon a loyal, patient, imperious attention on our part to what there is inside him, inside the particular individual man, and how we can get him to let us know what is inside, get him to decide voluntarily to let us have it, and let us work it into the common end.
In this amazing, impromptu, new, and hurried machine civilization which we have been piling up around us for a hundred years we have made machines out of everything, and our one consummate and glaring failure in the machines we have made is the machine we have made out of ourselves.
Mineral machines are made by putting comparatively dead, or at least dead-looking, matter together; vegetable machines or gardens, are made by studying little unconscious seeds that we can persuade to come up and to reproduce themselves. Man-machines are produced by putting up possible lives before particular individual men, and letting them find out (and finding out for ourselves, too), day by day, into which life they will grow up.
Everything in a social machine, if it is a machine that really works, is based on the profound and special study of individuals: upon drawing out the apt.i.tudes and motives, choices and genius in each man; the pa.s.sion, if he has any; the creative desire, the self-expressing, self-reproducing, inner manhood; the happy strength there is in him.
Trades unions overlook this, and treat all men alike and all employers alike. Employers have very largely overlooked it.
It is the industrial, social, and religious secret of our modern machine civilization. We need not be discouraged about machines, because the secret of the machine civilization has as yet barely been noticed.
The elephants are running around in the garden. But they have merely taken us by surprise. It is their first and their last chance. The men about us are seeing what to do. We are to get control of the elephants, first, by getting control of ourselves. We are beginning to organize our people-machines as if they were made of people; so that the people in them can keep on being people, and being better ones. And as our people-machines begin to become machines that really work, our iron machines will no longer be feared. They will reach over and help. As we look about us we shall see our iron machines at last, about all the world, all joining in, all hard at work for us, a million, million machines a day making the crowd beautiful.
CHAPTER XI