A hundred years before Andy Clark

A snippet seen in Gerald Stanley Lee’s 1906 work The Voice of the Machines, of which you will be hearing a great deal more in a very short while:

Some people are very fond of looking up at the sky, taking it for a regular exercise, and thinking how small they are. It relieves them. I do not wish to deny that there is a certain luxury in it. But I must say that for all practical purposes of a mind—of having a mind—I would be willing to throw over whole hours and days of feeling very small, any time, for a single minute of feeling big. The details are more interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of glittering generality.

You want to read this book. Soon we will let you. It’s a wonder.