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
God, 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 gods.

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 godlike
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
ma