Life & Wisdom Quote by C. S. Lewis

The line lands like a polite academic sentence and then quietly flips the table. Lewis punctures the heroic slogan of modernity - "Man’s power over Nature" - by revealing its hidden subject: not humanity in the abstract, but a managerial class with levers. The trick is grammatical. "Man" sounds collective, even noble; "some men" is specific, human, and suspicious. That pivot is the whole argument: whenever we celebrate a species-level triumph, we often launder a political arrangement.

Lewis wrote in the mid-century moment when science and bureaucracy were fusing into something new: technocracy with moral confidence. World War II had already shown what "applied" knowledge looks like when welded to state power. The subtext isn’t anti-science so much as anti-myth: he’s warning that technique doesn’t arrive as a neutral gift. It arrives inside institutions, budgets, and hierarchies. Nature becomes the instrument because controlling land, bodies, energy, reproduction, even attention is how authority becomes practical.

There’s also a theological edge, typical Lewis: a suspicion of projects that promise mastery while eroding the dignity of the person. "Power over Nature" flatters us with escape from limits; Lewis insists limits don’t disappear, they get reassigned. Someone decides who absorbs the costs, who gets the benefits, who is optimized, medicated, relocated, trained.

It works because it makes progress sound less like a rocket launch and more like a contract you didn’t read. The sentence doesn’t argue; it unmasks.