machines

81:6.207. Ef­fec­tive­ness of me­chan­i­cal de­vices. The prog­ress of civ­i­liza­tion is di­rectly re­lated to the de­vel­op­ment and pos­ses­sion of tools, ma­chines, and chan­nels of dis­tri­bu­tion. Im­proved tools, in­ge­nious and ef­fi­cient ma­chines, de­ter­mine the sur­vival of con­tend­ing groups in the arena of ad­vanc­ing civ­i­liza­tion.

81:2.14The sav­age is a slave to na­ture, but sci­en­tific civ­i­liza­tion is slowly con­fer­ring in­creas­ing lib­erty on man­kind. Through an­i­mals, fire, wind, wa­ter, elec­tric­ity, and other undis­cov­ered sources of en­ergy, man has lib­er­ated, and will con­tinue to lib­er­ate, him­self from the ne­ces­sity for un­remit­ting toil. Re­gard­less of the tran­sient trou­ble pro­duced by the pro­lific in­ven­tion of ma­chin­ery, the ul­ti­mate ben­e­fits to be de­rived from such me­chan­i­cal in­ven­tions are in­es­timable. Civ­i­liza­tion can never flour­ish, much less be es­tab­lished, un­til man has leisure to think, to plan, to imag­ine new and bet­ter ways of do­ing things.

195:6.11To say that mind “emerged” from mat­ter ex­plains noth­ing. If the uni­verse were merely a mech­a­nism and mind were un­a­part from mat­ter, we would never have two dif­fer­ing in­ter­pre­ta­tions of any ob­served phe­nom­e­non. The con­cepts of truth, beauty, and good­ness are not in­her­ent in ei­ther physics or chem­istry. A ma­chine can­not know, much less know truth, hunger for righ­teous­ness, and cher­ish good­ness.

195:6.13If men were only ma­chines, they would re­act more or less uni­formly to a ma­te­rial uni­verse. In­di­vid­u­al­ity, much less per­son­al­ity, would be nonex­is­tent.

195:7.3The in­con­sis­tency of the mod­ern mech­a­nist is: If this were merely a ma­te­rial uni­verse and man only a ma­chine, such a man would be wholly un­able to rec­og­nize him­self as such a ma­chine, and like­wise would such a ma­chine-man be wholly un­con­scious of the fact of the ex­is­tence of such a ma­te­rial uni­verse. The ma­te­ri­al­is­tic dis­may and de­spair of a mech­a­nis­tic sci­ence has failed to rec­og­nize the fact of the spirit-in­dwelt mind of the sci­en­tist whose very super­ma­te­rial in­sight for­mu­lates these mis­taken and self-con­tra­dic­tory con­cepts of a ma­te­ri­al­is­tic uni­verse.

195:7.8The very pes­simism of the most pes­simistic ma­te­ri­al­ist is, in and of it­self, suf­fi­cient proof that the uni­verse of the pes­simist is not wholly ma­te­rial. Both op­ti­mism and pes­simism are con­cept re­ac­tions in a mind con­scious of val­ues as well as of facts. If the uni­verse were truly what the ma­te­ri­al­ist re­gards it to be, man as a hu­man ma­chine would then be de­void of all con­scious rec­og­ni­tion of that very fact. With­out the con­scious­ness of the con­cept of val­ues within the spirit-born mind, the fact of uni­verse ma­te­ri­al­ism and the mech­a­nis­tic phe­nom­ena of uni­verse op­er­a­tion would be wholly un­rec­og­nized by man. One ma­chine can­not be con­scious of the na­ture or value of an­other ma­chine.

195:7.9A mech­a­nis­tic phi­los­o­phy of life and the uni­verse can­not be sci­en­tific be­cause sci­ence rec­og­nizes and deals only with ma­te­ri­als and facts. Phi­los­o­phy is in­evitably super­sci­en­tific. Man is a ma­te­rial fact of na­ture, but his life is a phe­nom­e­non which tran­scends the ma­te­rial lev­els of na­ture in that it ex­hibits the con­trol at­tri­butes of mind and the cre­ative qual­i­ties of spirit.

195:7.10The sin­cere ef­fort of man to be­come a mech­a­nist rep­re­sents the tragic phe­nom­e­non of that man’s fu­tile ef­fort to com­mit in­tel­lec­tual and moral sui­cide. But he can­not do it.

195:7.11If the uni­verse were only ma­te­rial and man only a ma­chine, there would be no sci­ence to em­bolden the sci­en­tist to pos­tu­late this mech­a­niza­tion of the uni­verse. Ma­chines can­not mea­sure, clas­sify, nor eval­u­ate them­selves. Such a sci­en­tific piece of work could be ex­e­cuted only by some en­tity of super­ma­chine sta­tus.

195:7.12If uni­verse re­al­ity is only one vast ma­chine, then man must be out­side of the uni­verse and apart from it in or­der to rec­og­nize such a fact and be­come con­scious of the in­sight of such an eval­u­a­tion.

195:7.13If man is only a ma­chine, by what tech­nique does this man come to be­lieve or claim to know that he is only a ma­chine? The ex­pe­ri­ence of self-con­scious eval­u­a­tion of one’s self is never an at­tri­bute of a mere ma­chine. A self-con­scious and avowed mech­a­nist is the best pos­si­ble an­swer to mech­a­nism. If ma­te­ri­al­ism were a fact, there could be no self-con­scious mech­a­nist. It is also true that one must first be a moral per­son be­fore one can per­form im­moral acts.

195:7.14The very claim of ma­te­ri­al­ism im­plies a super­ma­te­rial con­scious­ness of the mind which pre­sumes to as­sert such dog­mas. A mech­a­nism might de­te­ri­o­rate, but it could never pro­gress. Ma­chines do not think, cre­ate, dream, as­pire, ide­al­ize, hunger for truth, or thirst for righ­teous­ness. They do not mo­ti­vate their lives with the pas­sion to serve other ma­chines and to choose as their goal of eter­nal pro­gres­sion the sub­lime task of find­ing God and striv­ing to be like him. Ma­chines are never in­tel­lec­tual, emo­tional, aes­thetic, eth­i­cal, moral, or spir­i­tual.

81:6.22Sci­ence, guided by wis­dom, may be­come man’s great so­cial lib­er­a­tor. A me­chan­i­cal age can prove dis­as­trous only to a na­tion whose in­tel­lec­tual level is too low to dis­cover those wise meth­ods and sound tech­niques for suc­cess­fully ad­just­ing to the tran­si­tion dif­fi­cul­ties aris­ing from the sud­den loss of em­ploy­ment by large num­bers con­se­quent upon the too rapid in­ven­tion of new types of labor­sav­ing ma­chin­ery.