Never save here has a microcosm felt itself superior to its macrocosm, but here the little life-units have by the sheer force of their intellect made the unliving dependent upon themselves. It is a triumph, so far as we can see, unparalleled. Only this our Culture has achieved it, and perhaps only for a few centuries.

But for that very reason Faustian man has become _the slave of his creation_. His number, and the arrangement of life as he lives it, have been driven by the machine on to a path where there is no standing still and no turning back. The peasant, the hand-worker, even the merchant, appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with the _three great figures that the Machine has bred and trained up in the cause of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer, and the factory-worker_. Out of a quite small branch of manual work--namely, the preparation-economy--there has grown up (_in this one Culture alone_) a mighty tree that casts its shadow over all the other vocations--namely, _the economy of the machine-industry_.[938] It forces the entrepreneur not less than the workman to obedience. _Both_ become slaves, and not masters, of the machine, that now for the first time develops its devilish and occult power. But although the Socialistic theory of the present day has insisted upon looking only at the latter’s contribution and has claimed the word “work” for him alone, it has all become possible only through the sovereign and decisive achievement of the former. The famous phrase concerning the “strong arm” that bids every wheel cease from running is a piece of wrong-headedness. To stop them--yes! but it does not need a worker to do that. To keep them running--no! The centre of this artificial and complicated realm of the Machine is the organizer and manager. The mind, not the hand, holds it together. But, for that very reason, to preserve the ever endangered structure, _one_ figure is even more important than all the energy of enterprising master-men that make cities to grow out of the ground and alter the picture of the landscape; it is a figure that is apt to be forgotten in this conflict of politics--the _engineer_, the priest of the machine, the man who knows it. Not merely the importance, but the very existence of the industry depends upon the existence of the hundred thousand talented, rigorously schooled brains that command the technique and develop it onward and onward. The quiet engineer it is who is the machine’s master and destiny. His thought is as possibility what the machine is as actuality. There have been fears, thoroughly materialistic fears, of the exhaustion of the coal-fields. But so long as there are worthy technical path-finders, dangers of this sort have no existence. When, and only when, the crop of recruits for this army fails--this army whose thought-work forms one inward unit with the work of the machine--the industry must flicker out in spite of all that managerial energy and the workers can do. Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul’s health more important than all the powers of this world; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of rationalism to-day, the very élite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its _Satanism_ (it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux)--then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.

The Western industry has diverted the ancient traditions of the other Cultures. The streams of economic life move towards the seats of King Coal and the great regions of raw material. Nature becomes exhausted, the globe sacrificed to Faustian thinking in energies. The _working_ earth is the Faustian aspect of her, the aspect contemplated by the Faust of Part II, the supreme transfiguration of enterprising work--and contemplating, he dies. Nothing is so utterly antipodal to the motionless satiate being of the Classical Empire. It is the engineer who is remotest from the Classical law-thought, and he will see to it that his economy has _its own_ law, wherein forces and efficiencies will take the place of Person and Thing.