But to curse machines is to curse the spirit of humanity!
It puzzles me to conceive how any man can feel any satisfaction in such
a doctrine.
For, if true, what is its inevitable consequence? That there is no
activity, prosperity, wealth, or happiness possible for any people,
except for those who are stupid and inert, and to whom God has not
granted the fatal gift of knowing how to think, to observe, to combine,
to invent, and to obtain the greatest results with the smallest means.
On the contrary, rags, mean huts, poverty, and inanition, are the
inevitable lot of every nation which seeks and finds in iron, fire,
wind, electricity, magnetism, the laws of chemistry and mechanics, in a
word, in the powers of nature, an assistance to its natural powers. We
might as well say with Rousseau--"Every man that thinks is a depraved
animal."
This is not all. If this doctrine is true, since all men think and
invent, since all, from first to last, and at every moment of their
existence, seek the co-operation of the powers of nature, and try to
make the most of a little, by reducing either the work of their hands or
their expenses, so as to obtain the greatest possible amount of
gratification with the smallest possible amount of labour, it must
follow, as a matter of course, that the whole of mankind is rushing
towards its decline, by the same mental aspiration towards progress,
which torments each of its members.
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