Deluge epilogue

We are incessantly told, indeed, that the modern scientific appliances, even those like the telephone, which are now universly applied, are the miracles of man and the marvels of science, and the wonders of the new world. But though the inventions are talked of in this way, they are not treated in this way. Or ,rather they are so talked of in a theory they are not so talked of in practice. There has certainly been a rush of discovery, a rapid series of inventions; and, in one sense, the activity is marvelous and the rapidity might well look like magic. But it has been a rapidity in things going scale; a rush downhill to the flat and dreary world of the prosaic; a haste of marvelous things to lose their marvelous character; a deluge of wonders to destroy wonder. This may be the improvement of machinery, but it cannot possibly be the improvement of man. GK Chesterton, 'Our Indifference To Wonders', The Illustrated London News, 19 January 1935