03/01/2026
YOUNG MAN: You have arrived at man, now?
OLD MAN: Yes. Man the machine—man the impersonal engine. Whatsoever a man is, is due to his make, and to the influences brought to bear upon it
by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed,
commanded, by exterior influences—solely. He
originates nothing, not even a thought.
Y.M. Oh, come! Where did I get my opinion that this which you are talking is
all foolishness?
O.M. It is a quite natural opinion—indeed an inevitable opinion—but
you did not create the materials out of which it is formed. They are
odds and ends of thoughts, impressions, feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand books, a thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling which have flowed down into your heart and brain out of the hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors. Personally you did not create even the smallest microscopic fragment of the materials out of which your opinion is made; and personally you cannot claim even the slender merit of putting the borrowed materials together. That was done automatically—by your mental machinery, in strict accordance with the law of that machinery’s construction. And you not only did not make that machinery yourself, but you have not even any command over it.
[“What Is Man? and Other Essays” by Mark Twain]