A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals the nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately expressed. PART FOUR THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES The ideas of machinery in their several phases are sketched in chapters as follows: I. II. The idea of the incarnation. The God in the body of the man. III. The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from environment. IV. The idea of immortality. V. The idea of God. VI. The idea of the Spirit--of the Unseen and Intangible. VII. The practical idea of invoking great men. VIII. The religious idea of love and comradeship. * * * * * Note.--The present volume is the first of a series which had their beginnings in some articles in the _Atlantic_ a few years ago, answering or trying to answer the question, "Can a machine age have a soul?" Perhaps it is only fair to the present conception, as it stands, to suggest that it is an overture, and that the various phases and implications of machinery--the general bearing of machinery in our modern life, upon democracy, and upon the humanities and the arts, are being considered in a series of three volumes called: I. The Voice of the Machines. II. Machines and Millionaires. III. Machines and Crowds. BY THE SAME AUTHOR ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH. _$1.00._ "I have read it twice and enjoyed it the second time even more than the first."--_Oliver Wendell Holmes._ "I read the preface, and that one little bite out of the crust made me as hungry as a man on a railroad. What a bright evening full of laughter, touched every now and then with tenderness, it made for us I do not know how to tell. Here is a book I am glad to indorse as I would a note--right across the face and present it for payment in any man's library."--_Robert J. Burdette._ THE CHILD AND THE BOOK. _$.75._ (_G. P. Putnam's Sons._) "I must express with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthusiasm I have felt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the most brilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were laid aside. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form, and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive.... "I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. It is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makes me believe that after all we haven't a great kindergarten about us in authorship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can conceive that the date of the publication of this book may well be the date of the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long been scanning the horizon."--WM. SLOANE KENNEDY, in _Boston Transcript_.