The key ideas

The Human Machine

Arnold Bennett, 1908

In the morning you decide to keep your temper, and by breakfast the argument has already started. Arnold Bennett answers with two principles: your brain is your servant, not you, and whenever there is friction, your own machine is to blame. In this book from 1908, half an hour of morning training is tested by your tone of voice, by refusing to blame, and by knowing when to climb out of the canal.

Who it is for

For people who give sensible advice to others, yet in their own conversations still get irritated, argue and forget what they decided that morning.

You are not responsible for the universe; you are responsible for yourself.

Why an inventor never has time to be bored

Midnight. A man is lying on his back, not in bed but in a shed, under a car, with a candle in his hand. He has fixed one part, and another has broken. In the morning the car will roll out of the shed, crash five minutes later, and everything will start again. Inventors like him, writes Arnold Bennett, are among the happiest people on earth: their evenings are always too short.

Another man wakes in the night and sees everything around him with perfect clarity: his wife's faults, his worries about the children, the money he never managed to save, the pipe he should not have smoked. His own mistakes he notices only in passing, and looks away. He cannot change his circumstances, so he settles into a quiet discontent.

Bennett asks him: haven't you got a machine of your own? You have, and it is more complicated than any engine. That machine is you: your body and, above all, your brain, meaning your power to reason and to give orders to your muscles. Hence the title of his book from 1908, The Human Machine.

Deciding to look at your own machine, and not just curse the road, is already a brave step. Most people drive through their whole lives without once noticing that they are driving a machine at all.

You can understand poetry and still not know how to live an evening

At school we are taught to exercise our arms and legs and to know that eleven twelves are a hundred and thirty-two. About the art of living, not one word. Then adult life comes down to getting food, clothes and a roof over our heads. In Bennett's words, we mistake the preparations for living for living itself. And by fifty-five it is too late to turn professional, so we end our lives as amateurs.

He knows the objection: plenty of people spend their evenings improving themselves. Take a man who reads poetry every night and understands it finely. Then why is he always complaining about his job, worrying about money, sulking at his wife and eating more than his stomach can handle? He is like a motorist swerving all over the road who, asked what is wrong, invites you to admire his polished lamps.

The conclusion is blunt: a good deal of self-improvement is simply self-indulgence. Bennett admits he loves books himself and is exaggerating on purpose. But his measure is simple: does what you read help you get through today without friction, that is, without needless collisions with other people?

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About the author

Arnold Bennett, an English novelist and essayist, wrote about everyday life and about how people spend their time and their strength.

All books by this author: Arnold Bennett

Terms from the book

  • Friction
  • Jones
  • fatalism
  • Epictetus
  • Marcus Aurelius
  • concentration
  • human machine: Bennett's image: the body, and above all the brain, as the instruments through which a person lives among other people. It is not a scientific model of how the mind works.
  • intonation: How speech sounds: the rise and fall of the voice, its rhythm and expression, all of which carry part of the meaning.
  • financial reserve: Money set aside for future expenses and the unexpected. Bennett advises keeping a year's income in reserve.
  • Strand: One of the main streets of central London.
  • Charity Organisation Society: An English society founded in London in 1869. It helped the poor after looking into their circumstances, rather than through random almsgiving.
  • Balzac: Honoré de Balzac, a French novelist of the nineteenth century. Bennett quotes a thought of his from the novel Cousin Bette.

All terms

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