CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 323
appreciated, the machine has become the master of the man who works with it and an arbiter in the cultural fortunes of the community into whose life it has entered.
The intellectual and spiritual training of the mar chine in modern life, therefore, is very far-reaching. It leaves but a small proportion of the community untouched ; but while its constraint is ramified throughout the body of the population, and constrains virtually all classes at some points in their daily life, it falls with the most direct, intimate, and unmitigated impact upon the skilled mechanical classes, for these have no respite from its mastery, whether they are at work or at play.
The ubiquitous presence of the machine, with its spiritual concomitant — workday ideals and scepticism of what is only conventionally valid — is the unequivocal mark of the Western culture of to-day as contrasted with the culture of