new machine being for man a new organ--an artificial organ which
merely prolongs the natural organs--his body became suddenly and
prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being able at the
same time to dilate to the dimensions of his new body. From this
disproportion there issued the problems, moral, social, international,
which most of the nations endeavoured to solve by filling up the
soulless void in the body politic by creating more liberty, more
fraternity, more justice than the world had ever seen. Now, while
mankind laboured at this task of spiritualization, inferior powers--I
was going to say infernal powers--plotted an inverse experience for
mankind. What would happen if the mechanical forces, which science had
brought to a state of readiness for the service of man, should
themselves take possession of man in order to make his nature material
as their own? What kind of a world would it be if this mechanism
should seize the human race entire, and if the peoples, instead of
raising themselves to a richer and more harmonious diversity, as
_persons_ may do, were to fall into the uniformity of _things_? What
kind of a society would that be which should mechanically obey a word
of command mechanically transmitted; which should rule its science and
its conscience in accordance therewith; and which should lose, along
with the sense of justice, the power to discern between truth and
falsehood? What would mankind be when brute force should hold the
place of moral force? What new barbarism, this time final, would arise
from these conditions to stifle feeling, ideas, and the whole
civilization of which the old barbarism contained the germ? What would
happen, in short, if the moral effort of humanity should turn in its
tracks at the moment of attaining its goal, and if some diabolical
contrivance should cause it to produce the mechanization of spirit
instead of the spiritualization of matter? There was a people
predestined to try the experiment. Prussia had been militarized by her