Doubtless the term soldier lends itself more readily to philosophical generalization than the term mechanic. Perhaps, too, distance in time lends enchantment to the view, for the day of the soldier was, while the day of the mechanic is. The day of the soldier has reached the stage of romance and reflection, while the day of the mechanic suffers from what is commonplace and prosaic, from the associations of a particular life, from dust and smoke and factories, from tools and utilities. Yet the mechanic must be the romantic figure of the future. He is the typical individual of these modern times, of these times of the free because practical thinker, and of a nature not lifelessly mechanical but mechanically productive. Forget the grimy hands and the noisy machinery, the overshadowing smoke and the apparent absorption in mere utility, and think only of the man, who in his best moments feels himself individually responsible and capable, who believes in himself as having at once a peculiar and a necessary part in the real life of his time, and who expresses himself through some skilful mastery over the resources of nature, applying to them the principles his own thinking has uncovered, and using her machinery to the ends of his own nature, which, as we have seen, is bounded only by the "unity of experience."
Remember, too, the mechanic of our modern world is [p.229] not the factory labourer alone. Wherever in social life, whether in political activity or in industrial management, in educational methods or in religious effort, there appears a man who appreciates the need first of observing natural conditions and finding natural laws, and then of acting only in accord with the suggestions of the laws discovered, just there is the mechanic, the responsible agent of a law-free but always lawful nature. The soldier as creature of this world was only a passive, wholly material part of a mechanism which depended for its movement upon some outside power or will; but the mechanic, be he humble labourer skilful in the use of tools, or political leader supporting no law that is not, so far as can be known, in accord with natural life, or religious reformer loyal to life as it is, shares positively in the activity that makes the machinery go and in whatever this activity produces.