"Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?" - like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshiped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel.
They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power - of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form. For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for the first time.
They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going - not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages - the power of a living mind - the power of thought and choice and purpose."
- Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, pg 246
They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power - of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form. For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for the first time.
They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going - not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages - the power of a living mind - the power of thought and choice and purpose."
- Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, pg 246