Scientists, algorithms, and machines will very soon have sorted out the technical challenges of life -- the certainty rests in the revelation that the mind and its accessories are, as much as snowflakes and quasars, apprehensible as empirical phenomena. But far from robbing humanity of its soul, their accomplishments will give us, for the first time, an opportunity to make this rare affect available on a truly democratic scale. For most, the sacrifice necessary toward this consummation will be small : a few misconceptions to which our intuition makes us susceptible, and the peculiar custom, here and there, which they may have fostered. For the artist and the poet, the sacrifice will be greater. For it is in the very privilege of a soul that the artist and the poet has, at the expense of a little suffering, or a lot, commonly discovered that fulfillment of self for which others have turned to the consolation of a more material security, or its illusion. When the final barrier between information and material collapse, all pain and suffering will exist only as equations to be balanced. And artist and poet will lose their privilege and, in losing their privilege, hazard their identity. Well may this be motive to a new one, though one perhaps founded in a habit not very different from the old. Now, upon the poet, would settle that burden foreseen by Pater in the imagination of Leonardo : to brood over the correspondences between the different orders of life, through which, to eyes open, they interpret each other. And while the poet might brood as much as poets have always brooded, to the true artist would fall a deeper responsibility : to close our eyes so that we might again see, and hear, the world in its old imperfect light.