But go to more advanced machines. Take two clocks or two
locomotive engines, and though these are made in all respects exactly
alike, they will act (I can answer at least for the locomotive engines)
quite differently. One locomotive will swallow a vast quantity of water
at once; another must be fed by driblets; no one can say why. One engine
is a _fac-simile_ of the other; yet each has its character and its
peculiarities as truly as a man has. You need to know your engine's
temper before driving it, just as much as you need to know that of your
horse, or that of your friend. I know, of course, there is a mechanical
reason for this seeming caprice, if you could trace the reason. But not
one man in a thousand could trace out the reason. And the phenomenon, as
it presses itself upon us, really amounts to this: that very complicated
machinery appears to have a will of its own,--appears to exercise
something of the nature of choice. But there is no machine so capricious
as the human mind. The great poet who wrote those beautiful verses could
not do _that_ every day. A good deal more of what he writes is poor
enough; and many days he could not write at all. By long habit the mind
may be made capable of being put in harness daily for the humbler task
of producing prose; but you cannot say, when you harness it in the
morning, how far or at what rate it will run that day.
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