earth. And between these
he could establish the very expression of his will, the incarnation of his
power, a great and perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure
mechanical repetition, repetition ad infinitum, hence eternal and infinite. He
found his eternal and his infinite in the pure machine-principle of perfect
co-ordination into one pure, complex, infinitely repeated motion, like the
spinning of a wheel; but a productive spinning, as the revolving of the universe
may be called a productive spinning, a productive repetition through eternity,
to infinity. And this is the God-motion, this productive repetition ad
infinitum. And Gerald was the God of the machine, Deus ex Machina. And the whole
productive will of man was the Godhead.
    He had his life-work now, to extend over the earth a great and perfect
system in which the will of man ran smooth and unthwarted, timeless, a Godhead
in process. He had to begin with the mines. The terms were given: first the
resistant Matter of the underground; then the instruments of its subjugation,
instruments human and metallic; and finally his own pure will, his own mind. It
would need a marvellous adjustment of myriad instruments, human, animal,
metallic, kinetic, dynamic, a marvellous casting of myriad tiny wholes into one
great perfect entirety. And then, in this case there was perfection attained,
the will of the highest was perfectly fulfilled, the will of mankind was
perfectly enacted; for was not mankind mystically contradistinguished against
inanimate Matter, was not the history of mankind just the history of the
conquest of the one by the other?
    The miners were overreached. While they were still in the toils of divine
equality of man, Gerald had passed on, granted essentially their case, and
proceeded in his quality of human being to fulfil the will of mankind as a
whole. He merely represented the miners in a higher sense when he perceived that
the only way to fulfil perfectly the will of man was to establish the perfect,
inhuman machine. But he represented them very essentially, they were far behind,
out of date, squabbling for their material equality. The desire had already
transmuted into this new and greater desire, for a perfect intervening mechanism
between man and Matter, the desire to translate the Godhead into pure mechanism.
    As soon as Gerald entered the firm, the convulsion of death ran through the
old system. He had all his life been tortured by a furious and destructive
demon, which possessed him sometimes like an insanity. This temper now entered
like a virus into the