Faith & Spirit Quote by Karel Capek

Capek’s line is doing more than dunking on machines; it’s booby-trapping the modern fantasy that intelligence automatically equals personhood. Written by the author who effectively gave the world the word “robot,” it lands like a cold jab at an age newly drunk on factories, assembly lines, and the idea that humans could be engineered into efficiency. The insult is deliberate: robots can calculate, obey, even mimic, but they cannot cling. They don’t “hold on” because there’s nothing in them that panics at extinction or aches toward tomorrow.

The genius is in the comparison. Capek doesn’t say humans have more will than robots; he says grass does. That’s a brutal demotion of our techno-myths. Grass is mindless, but it persists. It grows back. It colonizes cracks in concrete. In a world where people were increasingly treated like replaceable parts, Capek flips the hierarchy: survival isn’t the pinnacle of reason, it’s the baseline of being alive. Instinct becomes a kind of dignity.

The subtext is political as much as metaphysical. “No soul, no instinct” echoes the period’s anxiety that modern systems - industrial, bureaucratic, militarized - were sanding down the messy, irrational drives that make humans hard to manage but also hard to erase. Capek isn’t simply arguing robots lack humanity; he’s warning that a society that worships robotic qualities may start breeding them into itself. The most chilling possibility isn’t sentient machines. It’s humans who stop reaching for life the way grass does.