RUR Society and Class Quotes

Primus and Helena seem to have developed souls in part because Dr. Gall fiddled with them and figured out how to put souls in. The workers develop consciousness and higher feelings through upper-class charity. This is indicative of Čapek's attitude towards workers throughout the book. He sympathizes with their plight to some extent, but he has trouble thinking of them as human. To the extent they are human, it's the doing of folks further up the class ladder. Working-class people, left to their own devices, seem to have no culture and no soul. It's only when they stop being working class people and race off into the sunset to do obscure things not involving work, as at the end of the play, that robots, or workers, are seen as human.