Prime mover

“ Then there is the way of looking at the world which rich men imagine they can purchase with money when they build a great house looking over some view—but it is not in the same street with walking! You see the sight nine times out of ten when you are ill attuned to it, when your blood is slow and unmoved, and when the machine is not going. When you are walking the machine is always going, and every sense in you is doing what it should with the right emphasis and in due discipline to make a perfect record of all that is about. ”

“ Or at least in our day we have found none. There is possible only a bending back of a branch of the Prime Continuum so that we can witness, warn, instruct, gain aid in saving the future. And there can be meeting only in this narrow sector of unreality where the branch joins the main stream. ”

“ Through some one of these great modern avenues you will make your way to wealth, and you will have the inestimable advantage of starting from the ground up—of mastering, for instance, all the details of a machine-shop, of an engine, of railway tracks, of the progressive development of that most mysterious of all forces, electricity, while your mind is still plastic. ”

“ Please note, this is quite aside from a secondary instinct, that of reproduction or survival of the race, which is not unheard of elsewhere.
But in Prime's humans, this tremendous desire for survival of the individual grew into a virtual obsession. I tested Prime, himself, on this factor, and found him quite normal. He had no feeling at all on the subject of remaining self-aware. I had thought this unseemly human characteristic might have been a perversion from his unhealthy egotism, but patently it was not. ”

“ Yet, does this continually and rapidly increasing power, instead of giving us any reason to anticipate the exhaustion of so fertile a field, place us at each advance, on some higher eminence, from which the mind contemplates the past, and feels irresistibly convinced, that the whole, already gained, bears a constantly diminishing ratio to that which is contained within the still more rapidly expanding horizon of our knowledge. ”

“ The swift stride of civilisation is leaving behind individual effort, and turning man into the Dæmon of a machine. To and fro in front of the long loom, lifting a lever at either end, paces he who once with painstaking intelligence drove the shuttle. Then he tasted the joy of completed work, that which his eye had looked upon, and his hands had handled; now his work is as little finished as the web of Penelope. ”

“ Now, the first sense suggested to us in these days by the word "progress," is material progress—all that came in with steam; and this narrow conception vitiates much of our reasoning. It is in this realm undoubtedly that competition is such a factor of rapid advance; but we forget that the food of what the best men have ever considered the best life, is not limited or divisible; but like the light and air is undiminished how many soever share it. ”

“ A decade, a cycle of years, and the men who pass you in Pall Mall, and the women who smile at you from their carriages, will be dead and gone. You—you may become the Emperor of Time itself. Remember that! ”

“ Again, it is well known that many, many men have spent considerable sums of money and given hours and hours, and days, and13 months, and years of close and careful thought, and experiment to the production of a machine that will accomplish Perpetual Motion, and that many have announced to the world that they had succeeded in its accomplishment, but that all their devices so far have turned out failures.
It is to no purpose to tell the Perpetual Motion worker that he is seeking to attain the impossible; that the attainment of self-motive power has been demonstrated to be an impossibility. ”

“ Each single one of the co-workers has the purpose and goal of his own endeavour before his eyes, but the human mind is incapable of guiding or even viewing, the concentrated action of all the forces at work.
We have given a cursory glance at the general economic development which started in the slowest possible way, and marched with double quick speed during the last fifty years, but now we shall turn to our own particular sphere. ”

“ The main source of new men of ability is from sturdy Puritan or Quaker stocks that have long practised self-denial and hard work; old families with long traditions of public service continue usually on the same line of ability; but the nouveaux riches who have sprung forward on some lucky speculation or trade enterprise usually go hopelessly to pieces in the next generation. The longer a useful type has been maintained the more stable it is.
(3) That artificial conditions tend to produce variation is obvious in every civilisation. ”

“ It is therefore, not surprising255 that in the history of Perpetual Motion labors, instances can be found where the tireless, but enthusiastic worker being full of confidence, and not secretive, and with the least bit of human carelessness about the truth have announced the actual discovery and successful operation of the machine. ”

“ The shadow lesson was forgotten by the time I reached my store, and thought entered into business with its usual ardor. I buried myself, amid letters, invoices, accounts, samples, schemes for gain, and calculations of profit. The regular, orderly progression of a fair and well-established business was too slow for my outreaching desires. I must drive onward at a higher speed, and reach the goal of wealth by a quicker way. ”

“ If this valuable machine comes finished from the hand of nature; if the rough blasts of fortune only attack the outward case, without affecting the internal works, and if reason conduces the piece, it may move on, with a calm, steady, and uninterrupted pace to a great extent of years, 'till time only annihilates the motion. ”

“ A psychological movement, once started, accumulates force and momentum up to a certain point where a reaction begins. This rhythmic movement as it appears in the capitalization of enterprises is favored and magnified, we have seen, by the wide use of credit and by the constantly changing technical and physical conditions of industry. ”

“ When every investor in our lists is behind me, when I'm the apex of a triangle with every atom of force at my back, shoving me forward—do you think I can fail? Do you think anybody can rise up and whip me? ”

“ Now the habit of composing the plan as perfectly, yet as succinctly as possible, daily or nightly, combined with the energetic impulse to send it off, will ere long give the operator a conception of what I mean by Foresight which by description I cannot. And when grown familiar and really mastered its possessor will find that his power to think and act promptly in all the emergencies of life has greatly increased. ”

“ As a matter of fact what has happened in every case like these is an actual change of standard, a new construction in the growing system of one's norms of value and behavior. Provisionally, though hopefully, a step has been taken—a real event in personal and in social history has been given place and date. From some source beyond the scope and nature of the earlier function a suggestion or an impulsion has come by which the agent has endeavored to move forward. ”

“ Perpetual Motion as used in this book means what it is usually understood to mean—Self-Motive Power—a machine that furnishes the power to keep its parts going as a machine. In this sense Perpetual Motion has always engaged the minds of many, many people—and what is more natural? ”

“ But from the mobility of the movement we turn away as much as we can; what interests us is, as we said above, the unmovable plan of the movement rather than the movement itself. Is it a simple movement? We ask ourselves where it is going. It is by its direction, that is to say, by the position of its provisional end, that we represent it at every moment. ”

“ To-day you are a deity, to-morrow the meanest of street curs. To-day sixty agents shriek out the name of your speculation; you are a sort of king, and all the other kings on 'change study your countenance to see how the wind shifts. To-day, so soon as one o'clock strikes by the town clock, a swarm of buyers come round you. Your note-book is held up to the view of all the agents. It is handed from one to another; it is placed upon the back of an agent, and the competitors write the number of shares they want. To-day all hands point to the percentage, which is the proof of your high estate. ”

“ In this period of redistribution impulse determines the direction of movement. It furnishes the focus about which reorganization swirls. Our attention in short is always directed forward to bring to notice something which is imminent but which as yet escapes us. ”

“ We had our times for measuring each other’s strength, but we knew too much to keep up the competition so long as to produce an extraordinary day’s work. We knew that if by extraordinary exertion a large quantity of work was done in one day, becoming known to the master, it might lead him to require the same amount every day. ”

“ It is a circuit of vitalism which flows between master and man and forms a very precious nourishment to each, and keeps both in a state of subtle, quivering, vital equilibrium. Deny it as you like, it is so. But once you abstract both master and man, and make them both serve an idea: production, wage, efficiency, and so on: so that each looks on himself as an instrument performing a certain repeated evolution, then you have changed the vital, quivering circuit of master and man into a mechanical machine unison. ”

“ I am anxious that it should ‘boom’—that is the correct term, is it not?—and a sensation is good for ‘booming.’ What an advertisement would ensue if the lovely daughter of an American millionaire should be in danger of drowning in the Long Cloud, and a rough but honest fellow—a foreman on the river, maybe a young member of the English aristocracy in disguise—perilled his life for her! ”

“ Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is raised for a new road or another statute, or a subscription of stock, for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry, for a new house or a larger business, for a political party, or the division of an estate,—will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? Soon these improvements and mechanical inventions will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of memory ”

“ Talent, eager and active, desires the means of employment; Property, cautious, doubtful, jealous of innovation, acts as a regulator rather than an impulse on the machine, by preventing its either moving too rapidly, or changing too suddenly. The over-caution of those by whom property is represented, may sometimes, indeed, delay a projected improvement, but much more frequently impedes a rash and hazardous experiment. ”

“ Suppose, then, that the driver e is moved a certain portion of a revolution with tail d at its highest point, and is then moved through the same portion of a revolution with d at its lowest point in its path of revolution, and being at a greater distance or leverage when at the top than when at the bottom it will revolve the work less. ”

“ The Accumulation, as we called this power, because we feared to call it by its true name, rewarded its own with gains of twenty, of a hundred, of a thousand per cent., and to satisfy its need, to produce the labor that operated its machines, there came into existence a hapless race of men who bred their kind for its service, and whose little ones were its prey almost from their cradles. ”

“ One and a half years it took them to move all their treasures and priceless records, all their goods, all their machines and themselves across the void into their new cities. One and a half years of swift, efficient labor that transformed these new worlds into civilized planets. ”

“ So much, then, for a preliminary bird's-eye view of a mammoth machine, not a machine for turning out shoes or typewriters or paper, but for buying and selling all these things and many, many more. And as you read in the earlier part of this book, the huge mechanism did not spring into its being in a year, or in a decade, or even in a generation. It represents slow, hard, steady growth; and slow, hard, steady growth it is still having. ”

“ The word “dynamic” has come to mean, in newspaper language, “energetic and forceful”; but if it meant “illustrating the principles of dynamics,” it ought to be applied to the people in hot climates who sit under banana trees waiting for the fruit to drop into their mouths. I hope that journalists, in future, when they speak of a “dynamic personality,” will mean a person who does what is least trouble at the moment, without thinking of remote consequences. ”

“ But in those days the wheel of fortune was beginning to turn, and far-sighted men prophesied that many an obscure individual would one day be playing the part of a great personage. Years would still elapse before the change, but the change would surely come at last. ”

“ The extravagances are eliminated, new invention and energy spring up to meet the call of necessity, and when the boom years come again it finds industry, like a highly trained athlete, ready to pour out the goods and pay the wages. ”

“ These mechanical giants puffed and panted with an almost human expression, in their vigorous struggle to drag the train forward,—now and again hovering upon the very verge of inability, and then, as it seemed to us, by putting forth renewed energy and extraordinary effort, pressing forward and finally surmounting the steep way. ”

“ Wide roads were open to the young man 18of brains and courage, roads which would lead to place and power. Fortunes were to be made, positions won; and the ’prentice, starting out in his career, had many examples of self-made and successful men to remind him that the world was all before him where to choose, and that the future largely depended upon himself. ”