 21 The Colleges of Unreason I had now been a visitor with the Nazniborahs for some five or six months, and though I had frequently proposed to leave them and take apartments of my own, they would not hear of my doing so. I suppose they thought I should be more likely to fall in love with Zulora if I remained, but it was my affection for Arawena that kept me. During all this time both Arawena and myself had been dreaming and drifting towards an avowed attachment, but had not dared to face the real difficulties of the position. Gradually however matters came to a crisis in spite of ourselves, and we got to see the true state of the case all too clearly. One evening we were sitting in the garden, and I had been trying in every stupid roundabout way to get her to say that she should be at any rate sorry for a man if he really loved a woman who would not marry him. I had been stammering and blushing, and been as silly as anyone could be, and I suppose had pained her by fishing for pity for myself in such a transparent way, and saying nothing about her own need of it. At any rate she turned all upon me with a sweet, sad smile, and said, Sorry? I am sorry for myself. I am sorry for you, and I am sorry for everyone. The words had no sooner crossed her lips than she bowed her head, gave me a look as though I were to make no answer, and left me. The words were few and simple, but the manner with which they were uttered was ineffable. The scales fell from my eyes, and I felt that I had no right to try and induce her to infringe one of the most inviolable customs of her country, as she needs must do if she were to marry me. I sat for a long while thinking, and when I remembered the sin and shame and misery which an unrighteous marriage, for as such it would be held an error one would entail, I became thoroughly ashamed of myself for having been so long self-blinded. I write coldly now, but I suffered keenly at the time, and should probably retain a much more vivid recollection of what I felt had not all ended so happily. As for giving up the idea of marrying Eruina, it never so much as entered my head to do so. The solution must be found in some other direction than this. The idea of waiting till somebody married Zalora was to be no less summarily dismissed. To marry Eruina at once in Eruan, this had already been abandoned. They remained therefore but one alternative, and that was to run away with her, and get her with me to Europe, where there would be no bar to our union save my own impicuniosity, a matter which gave me no uneasiness. To this obvious and simple plan I could see but two objections that deserved the name, the first, that perhaps Eruina would not come, the second, that was almost impossible for me to escape even alone, for the king had himself told me that I was to consider myself a prisoner on parole, and that the first sign of my endeavouring to escape would cause me to be sent to one of the hospitals for incurables. Besides, I did not know the geography of the country, and even were I to try and find my way back, I should be discovered long before I had reached the pass over which I had come. How then could I hope to be able to take Eruina with me? For days and days I turned these difficulties over in my mind, and at last hit upon as wild a plan as was ever suggested by Exchemity. This was to meet the second difficulty. The first gave me less uneasiness, for when Eruina and I next met after our interview in the garden, I could see that she had suffered not less acutely than myself. I resolved that I would have another interview with her, the last for the present, that I would then leave her and set to work upon maturing my plan as fast as possible. We got a chance of being alone together, and then I gave myself the loose reign and told her how passionately and devotedly I loved her. She said little in return, but her tears, which I could not refrain from answering with my own, and the little she did say were quite enough to show me that I should meet with no obstacle from her. Then I asked her whether she would run a terrible risk which we should share in common if, in case of success, I could take her to my own people, to the home of my mother and sisters, who would welcome her very gladly. At the same time I pointed out that the chances of failure were far greater than those of success, and that the probability was that even though I could get so far as to carry my design into execution, it would end in death to us both. I was not mistaken in her. She said that she believed I loved her as much as she loved me, and that she would brave anything if I could only assure her that what I proposed would not be thought dishonorable in England. She could not live without me, and would rather die with me than alone, that death was perhaps the best for us both, that I must plan, and that when the hour came I was to send for her, and trust her not to fail me, and so after many tears and embraces we tore ourselves away. I then left the Nasnabours, who took a lodging in the town, and became melancholy to my heart's content. Arauina and I used to see each other sometimes, for I had taken to going regularly to the musical banks. But Mrs. Nasnabours and Zalora both treated me with considerable coldness. I felt sure that they suspected me. Arauina looked miserable, and I saw that her purse was now always as full as she could fill it with musical bank money—much fuller than of old. Then the horrible thought occurred to me that her health might break down, and that she might be subjected to a criminal prosecution. Oh, how I hated Arauina at this time. I was still received at court, but my good looks were beginning to fail me, and I was not such an adept at concealing the effects of pain as the Arauonians are. I could see that my friends began to look concerned about me, and was obliged to take a leaf out of Mahina's book, and pretend to have developed a taste for drinking. I even consulted a straightener, as though this were so, and submitted to much discomfort. This made matters better for a time, but I could see that my friends thought less highly of my constitution as my flesh began to fall away. I was told that the poor made an outcry about my pension, and I saw a stinging article and an anti-ministerial paper in which the writer went so far as to say that my having light hair reflected little credit upon me, in as much as I had been reported to have said that it was a common thing in the country from which I came. I have reason to believe that Mr. Nasnabor himself inspired this article. Presently it came round to me that the king had begun to dwell upon my having been possessed of a watch, and to say that I ought to be treated medicinally for having told him a lie about the balloons. I saw a misfortune gathering round me in every direction, and felt that I should have need of all my wits, and a good money more if I was to steer myself and Arauina to a good conclusion. There were some who continued to show me kindness, and strange to say I received the most from the very persons from whom I should have least expected it. I mean from the cashiers of the musical banks. I had made the acquaintance of several of these persons, and now that I frequented their banks, they were inclined to make a good deal of me. One of them, seeing that I was thoroughly out of health, though of course he pretended not to notice it, suggested that I should take a little change of air, and go down with him to one of the principal towns, which was some two or three days' journey from the metropolis, and the chief seat of the colleges of unreason. He assured me that I should be delighted with what I saw, and that I should receive a most hospitable welcome. I determined therefore to accept the invitation. We started, two or three days later, and after a night on the road we arrived at our destination towards evening. It was now full spring, and as nearly as might be ten months since I had started with Chowbuck on my expedition, but it seemed more like ten years. The trees were in their freshest beauty, and the air had become warm without being oppressively hot. And having lived so many months in the metropolis, the sight of the country and the country villages to which we passed refreshed me greatly, but I could not forget my troubles. The last five miles or so were the most beautiful part of the journey, for the country became more undulating, and the woods were more extensive. But the first sight of the city of the colleges itself was the most delightful of all. I cannot imagine that there can be any ferrer in the whole world, and I expressed my pleasure to my companion, and thanked him for having brought me. We drove to an inn in the middle of the town, and then while it was still light, my friend, the cashier, whose name was Thames, took me for a stroll in the streets and in the courtyards of the principal colleges. Their beauty and interest were extreme. It was impossible to see them without being attracted towards them, and I thought to myself that he must be indeed an ill-grained and ungrateful person who can have been a member of one of these colleges without retaining an affectionate feeling towards it for the rest of his life. All my misgivings gave way at once when I saw the beauty and venerable appearance of this delightful city. For half an hour I forgot both myself and Eruina. After supper Mr. Thames told me a good deal about the system of education which is here practiced. I already knew a part of what I heard, but much was new to me, and I obtained a better idea of the Erwonian position than he had done hitherto. Nevertheless, there were parts of the scheme of which I could not comprehend the fitness. Although I fully admit that this inability was probably the result of my having been trained so differently, and to my being then much out of sorts, the main feature in their system is the prominence which they give to a study which I can only translate by the word Hypothetics. They argue thus, that to teach a boy merely the nature of the things which exist in the world around him, and about which he will have to be conversant during his whole life, would be giving him but a narrow and shallow conception of the universe, which is urged might contain all manner of things which are not now to be found therein. To open his eyes to these possibilities, and so to prepare him for all sorts of emergencies, is the object of this system of Hypothetics. To imagine a set of utterly strange and impossible contingencies, and require the youths to give intelligent answers to the questions that arise therefrom, is reckoned the fittest conceivable way of preparing them for the actual conduct of their affairs and afterlife. Thus they are taught what is called the hypothetical language for many of their best years, a language which was originally composed at a time when the country was in a very different state of civilization to what it is at present, a state which has long since disappeared and been superseded. Many valuable maxims and noble thoughts which were at one time concealed in it have become current in their modern literature, and have been translated over and over again into the language now spoken. Surely then it would seem enough that the study of the original language should be confined to the few whose instincts led them naturally to pursue it. But the Erwanians think differently. The store they set by this hypothetical language can hardly be believed. They will even give anyone a maintenance for life if he attains a considerable proficiency in the study of it. Nay, they will spend years in learning to translate some of their own good poetry into the hypothetical language, to do so with fluency being reckoned distinguishing mark of a scholar and a gentleman. Heaven forbid that I should be flippant, but it appeared to me to be a wanton waste of good human energy that men should spend years and years and the perfection of so barren an exercise, when their own civilization presented problems by the hundred which cried aloud for solution and would have paid the solver handsomely. But people know their own affairs best. If the youths chose it for themselves I should have wondered less, but they do not choose it. They have it thrust upon them and for the most part are disinclined towards it. I can only say that all I heard in defense of the system was insufficient to make me think very highly of its advantages. The arguments in favor of the deliberate development of the unreasoning faculties were much more cogent, but here they depart from the principles on which they justify their study of hypothetics, for they base the importance which they assign to hypothetics upon the fact of there being a preparation for the extraordinary, while their study of unreason rests upon its developing those faculties which are required for the daily conduct of affairs, hence their professorships of inconsistency and evasion. In both of which studies the youths are examined before being allowed to proceed to their degree in hypothetics. The more earnest and conscientious students attain to a proficiency in these subjects which is quite surprising. There is hardly any inconsistency so glaring, but they soon learn to defend it or injunction so clear that they cannot find some pretext for disregarding it. Life, they urge, would be intolerable of men were to be guided in all they did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fat lines, and to the defining by language, language being like the sun which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd. The mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies and no unreasonablenesses so great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself. And there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct upon reason only. Reason might very possibly abolish the double currency. It might even attack the personality of hope and justice. Besides, people have such a strong natural bias towards it that they will seek it for themselves and act upon it quite as much as or more than is good for them. There is no need of encouraging reason. With unreason the case is different. She is the natural compliment of reason, without whose existence reason itself were non-existent. If then reason would be non-existent were there no such thing as unreason, surely it follows that the more unreason there is, the more reason there must be also. Hence the necessity for the development of unreason, even in the interest of reason herself. The professors of unreason deny that they undervalue reason. None can be more convinced than they are that if the double currency cannot be rigorously deduced as a necessary consequence of human reason the double currency should cease forthwith. But they say that it must be deduced from no narrow and exclusive view of reason which should deprive that admirable faculty of the one half of its own existence. Un-reason is a part of reason. It must therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions. THE COLLEGERS OF UNREASON OF GENIUS Of genius they make no account for they say that everyone is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy. So no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked. And no man is so mad and wicked, but he will be sensible and honorable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius. When I talked about originality in genius to some gentleman whom I met at a supper party given by Mr. Tims in my honor, and said that original thought ought to be encouraged, I had to eat my words at once. Their view evidently was that genius was like offenses. Needs must that it come, but woe unto that man through whom it comes. A man's business they hold is to think as his neighbors do, for heaven help him if he thinks good what they can't bad, and really it is hard to see how the Erwonian theory differs from our own, for the word idiot only means a person who forms his opinions for himself. The venerable professor of worldly wisdom, a man verging on 80 but still hail, spoke to me very seriously on this subject in consequence of the few words that I had imprudently let fall in defensive genius. He was one of those who carried most weight in the university, and had the reputation of having done more perhaps than any other living man to suppress any kind of originality. It is not our business, he said, to help students to think for themselves. Surely this is the very last thing which one who wishes them well should encourage them to do. Our duty is to ensure that they shall think as we do, or at any rate as we hold it expedient to say we do. In some respects, however, he was thought to hold somewhat radical opinions, for he was president of the society for the suppression of useless knowledge, and for the complete obliteration of the past. As regards the tests that a youth must pass before he can get a degree, I found that they have no class lists and discourage anything like competition among the students. This indeed they regard as self-seeking and unneighborly. The examinations are conducted by way of papers written by the candidate on set subjects, some of which are known to him beforehand, while others are devised with a view of testing his general capacity and savois faire. My friend, the professor of worldly wisdom, was the terror of the greater number of students, and so far as I could judge, he very well might be, for he had taken his professorship more seriously than any of the other professors had done. I heard of his having plucked one poor fellow for a want of sufficient vagueness in his saving clauses paper. Another was sent down for having written an article on a scientific subject without having made free enough use of the words carefully, patiently, and earnestly. One man was refused a degree for being too often and too seriously in the right, while a few days before I came a whole batch had been plucked for insufficient distrust of printed matter. About this there was just then rather a ferment for it seems that the professor had written an article in the leading university magazine, which was well known to be by him, and which abounded in all sorts of plausible blunders. He then set a paper which afforded the examinees an opportunity of repeating these blunders, which believing the article to be by their own examiner they, of course, did. The professor plucked every single one of them, but his action was considered to have been not quite handsome. I told them of Homer's noble line to the effect that a man should strive ever to be foremost and in all things to outvi his peers. But they said that no wonder the countries in which such a detestable maxim was held in admiration were always flying at one another's throats. Why, asked one professor, should a man want to be better than his neighbors? Let him be thankful if he is no worse. I ventured feebly to say that I did not see how progress could be made in any art or science, or indeed in anything at all without more or less self-seeking and hence unamiability. Of course it cannot, said the professor, and therefore we object to progress. After which there was no more to be said. Later on, however, a young professor took me aside and said he did not think I quite understood the reviews about progress. We like progress, he said, but it must commend itself to the common sense of the people. If a man gets to know more than his neighbors, he should keep his knowledge to himself till he has sounded them, and seen whether they agree or are likely to agree with him. He said it was as immoral to be too far in front of one's own age as to lag too far behind it. If a man can carry his neighbors with him, he may say what he likes. But if not, what insult can be more gratuitous than telling them what they do not want to know? A man should remember that intellectual overindulgence is one of the most insidious and disgraceful forms that excess can take. Granted that everyone should exceed more or less in as much as absolutely perfect sanity would drive any man mad the moment he reached it, but he was now warming to his subject, and I was beginning to wonder how I should get rid of him when the party broke up, and though I promised to call on him before I left, I was unfortunately prevented from doing so. I have now said enough to give English readers some idea of the strange views which they are warning and told concerning unreason, hypothetics, and education generally. In many respects they were sensible enough, but I cannot get over the hypothetics, especially the turning their own good poetry into the hypothetical language. In the course of my stay I met one youth who told me that for 14 years the hypothetical language had been almost the only thing that he had been taught, although he had never, to his credit as it seemed to me, shown the slightest proclivity towards it while he had been endowed with not inconsiderable ability for several other branches of human learning. He assured me that he would never open another hypothetical book after he had taken his degree, but would follow out the event of his own inclinations. This was well enough, but who could give him his 14 years back again? I sometimes wondered how it was that the mischief done was not more clearly perceptible, and that the young men and women grew up as sensible and goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless received a damage, from which they suffered to their life's end, but many seemed little or none the worse, and some almost the better. The reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training that due to what the teachers might they could never get them to pay serious heed to it. The consequence was that the boys only lost their time, and not so much of this might have been expected. For in their hours of leisure, they were actively engaged in exercises and sports which developed their physical nature, and made them at any rate strong and healthy. Moreover, those who had any special tastes could not be restrained from developing them. They would learn what they wanted to learn and liked, in spite of obstacles which seemed rather to urge them on than to discourage them. While for those who had no special capacity, the loss of time was of comparatively little moment, but in spite of these alleviations of the mischief, I am sure that much harm was done to the children of the sub-wealthy classes by the system which passes current among the Erwonians as education. The poorest children suffered least. If destruction and death have heard the sound of wisdom, to a certain extent poverty is done so also. And yet, perhaps after all, it is better for a country that its seats of learning should do more to suppress mental growth than to encourage it. Were it not for a certain prigishness which these places infuse into so great a number of their alumni, genuine work would become dangerously common. It is essential that by far the greater part of what is said or done in the world should be so ephemeral as to take itself away quickly. It should keep good for 24 hours or even twice as long, but it should not be good enough a week hence to prevent people from going on to something else. No doubt the marvelous development of journalism in England and also the fact that our seats of learning aim rather at fostering mediocrity than anything higher is due to our subconscious recognition of the fact that it is even more necessary to check exuberance of mental development than to encourage it. There can be no doubt that this is what our academic bodies do, and they do it the more effectually because they do it only subconsciously. They think they are advancing healthy mental assimilation and digestion whereas in reality they are a little better than cancer in the stomach. Let me return however to the Erwonians. Nothing surprised me more than to see the occasional flashes of common sense with which one branch of study or another was lit up while not a single ray fell upon so many others. I was particularly struck with this on strolling into the art school of the university. Here I found that the course of study was divided into two branches, the practical and the commercial. No student being permitted to continue his studies in the actual practice of the art he had taken up unless he made equal progress in its commercial history. Thus those who were studying painting were examined at frequent intervals in the prices which all the leading pictures of the last fifty or a hundred years had realized, and in the fluctuations in their values when as often happened they had been sold and resold three or four times. The artist they contend is a dealer in pictures, and it is as important for him to learn how to adapt his wares to the market and to know approximately what kind of a picture will fetch how much as it is for him to be able to paint the picture. This I suppose is what the French mean by laying so much stress upon values. As regards the city itself the more I saw the more enchanted I became. I dare not trust myself with any description of the exquisite beauty of the different colleges and their walks and gardens. Truly in these things alone there must be a hallowing and refining influence which is in itself half an education, and which no amount of error can wholly spoil. I was introduced to many of the professors who showed me every hospitality and kindness. Nevertheless I could hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some of those whom I was taken to see had been so long and grossed in their own study of hypotheticals that they had become the exact antithesis of the Athenians in the days of Saint Paul. For whereas the Athenians spent their lives in a nothing saved to see and to hear some new thing, there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the avoidance of every opinion with which they were not perfectly familiar, and regarded their own brains as a sort of sanctuary to which if an opinion had once resorted none other was to attack it. I should warn the reader however that I was rarely sure what the men whom I met while staying with Mr. Thames really meant, for there was no getting anything out of them if they scented even a suspicion that they might be what they call giving themselves away. As there is hardly any subjects on which this suspicion cannot arise, I found it difficult to get definite opinions from any of them except on such subjects as the weather, eating and drinking, holiday excursions, or games of skill. If they cannot wriggle out of expressing an opinion of some sort they will commonly retell those of someone who was already written upon the subject and conclude by saying that though they quite admit that there is an element of truth in what the writer has said, there are many points on which they are unable to agree with him, which these points were I invariably found myself unable to determine. Indeed it seemed to be counted the perfection of scholarship and good breathing among them not to have much less to express an opinion on any subject on which it might prove later that they had been mistaken. The art of sitting gracefully on a fence has never I should think been brought to greater perfection than at the Erwonian colleges of unreason. Even when wriggle as they may they find themselves pinned down to some expression of definite opinion as often as not they will argue in support of what they perfectly well know to be untrue. I repeatedly met with reviews and articles even in their best journals between the lines of which I had little difficulty in detecting a sense exactly contrary to the one ostensibly put forward. So well is this understood that a man must be a mere tyro in the arts of Erwonian polite society unless he instinctively suspects a hidden yay in every nay that meets him. Granted that it comes to much the same in the end, for it does not matter whether yay is called yay or nay so long as it is understood which it is to be but our own more direct way of calling a spade a spade rather than a rake with the intention that everyone should understand it as a spade seems more satisfactory. On the other hand the Erwonian system lends itself better to the suppression of that downrightness which it seems the express aim of Erwonian philosophy to discontent. However this may be, the fear of giving themselves a way disease was fatal to the intelligence of those infected by it and almost everyone at the colleges of unreasonate caught it to a greater or less degree. After a few years atrophy of the opinions invariably supervened and the sufferer became stone dead to everything except the more superficial aspect of those material objects with which he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these people was repellent. They did not however seem particularly unhappy for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear of giving themselves a way disease as yet been discovered. It was during my stay in the city of the colleges of unreason a city whose Erwonian name is so cacophonous that I refrained from giving it that I learned the particulars of the revolution which had ended in the destruction of so many of the mechanical inventions which were formerly in common use. Mr. Thims took me to the rooms of a gentleman who had a great reputation for learning but who was also so Mr. Thims told me rather a dangerous person in as much as he had attempted to introduce an adverb into the hypothetical language. He had heard of my watch and been exceedingly anxious to see me for he was accounted the most learned antiquarian Erwon on the subject of mechanical lore. We fell to talking upon the subject and when I left he gave me a reprinted copy of the work which brought the revolution about. It had taken place some five hundred years before my arrival. People had long become thoroughly used to the change although at the time that it was made the country was plunged into the deepest misery and a reaction which followed had very nearly proved successful. Civil War raged for many years and is said to have reduced the number of the inhabitants by one half. The parties were styled the machinists and the anti machinists and in the end as I have said already the latter got the victory treating their opponents with such unparalleled severity that they extirpated every trace of opposition. The wonder was that they allowed any mechanical appliances to remain in the kingdom and neither do I believe that they would have done so had not the professors of inconsistency and evasion made a stand against the carrying of the new principles to their legitimate conclusions. These professors more over insisted that during the struggle the anti machinists should use every known improvement in the art of war and several new weapons offensive and defensive were invented while it was in progress. I was surprised that they're remaining so many mechanical specimens as are seen in the museums and at students having rediscovered their past uses so completely. For at the time of the revolution the victors wrecked all the more complicated machines and burned all treatises on mechanics and all engineers workshops thus so they thought cutting the mischief out root and branch at an incalculable cost of blood and treasure. Certainly they had not spared their labor but work of this description can never be perfectly achieved and when some 200 years before my arrival all passion upon the subject had cooled it down and no one say of a lunatic would have dreamed of reintroducing forbidden inventions the subject came to be regarded as a curious antiquarian study like that of some long forgotten religious practices among ourselves then came the careful search for whatever fragments could be found and for any machines that might have been hidden away and also numberless treatises were written showing what the functions of each rediscovered machine had been all being done with no idea of using such machinery again but with the feelings of an English antiquarian concerning druidical monuments or flint arrowheads. On my return to the metropolis during the remaining weeks or rather days of my sojourn in Erewan I made a resume in English of the work which brought about the already mentioned revolution. My ignorance of technical terms has led me doubtless into many errors and I have occasionally where I have found a translation impossible substituted purely English names and ideas for the original Erewanian ones but the reader may rely on my general accuracy I have thought it best to insert my translation here. End of Chapter 22 Chapter 23 of Erewan. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Scott Carpenter. Erewan by Samuel Butler. Chapter 23 The Book of the Machines The writer commences. There was a time when the earth was to all appearance utterly destitute both of animal and vegetable life and when, according to the opinion of our best philosophers, it was simply a hot round ball with a crust gradually cooling. Now a human being had existed while the earth was in this state and had been allowed to see it as though it were some other world with which he had no concern and if at the same time he were entirely ignorant of all physical science. Would he not have pronounced it impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have denied that it contained any potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came. Is it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug out for consciousness though we can detect no signs of them at present? Again, consciousness in anything like the present acceptation of the term, having been once a new thing, a thing as far as we can see subsequent even to an individual center of action and to a reproductive system which we see in existing plants without apparent consciousness, why may there not arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables? It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state or whatever it may be called in as much as it must be something so foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature, but surely when we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already it would be rash to say that no others can be developed and that animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the end of all things, another when rocks and water were so. The writer, after enlarging on the above for several pages, proceeded to inquire whether traces of the approach of such a new phase of life could be perceived at present, whether we could see any tenements preparing which might in a remote futurity be adapted for it, whether in fact the primordial cell of such a kind of life could be now detected upon earth. In the course of his work he answered this question in the affirmative and pointed to the higher machines. There is no security to quote his own words against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusk has not much consciousness, reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years. See what strides machines have made in the last thousand. May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress? But who can say that the vapor engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a hen's egg is made of a delicate white wear and is a machine as much as an egg cup is. The shell is a device for holding the egg as much as the egg cup for holding the shell. Both are phases of the same function. The hen makes the shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery. She makes her nest outside of herself for convenient sake, but the nest is not more of a machine than the egg shell is. A machine is only a device. Then returning to consciousness and endeavoring to detect its earliest manifestations, the writer continued. There is a kind of plant that eats organic food with its flowers. When a fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and hold it fast till the plant has absorbed the insect into its system. But they will close on nothing but what is good to eat. Of the drop of rain or a piece of stick they will take no notice. Curious, that so unconscious a thing should have such a keen eye to its own interest. If this is unconsciousness, where is the use of consciousness? Shall we say that the plant does not know what it is doing merely because it has no eyes or ears or brains? If we say that it acts mechanically and mechanically only, shall we not be forced to admit that sundry other and apparently very deliberate actions are also mechanical? If it seems to us that the plant kills and eats a fly mechanically, may it not seem to the plant that a man must kill and eat a sheep mechanically. But it may be said that the plant is void of reason because the growth of a plant is an involuntary growth. Given earth, air, and due temperature, the plant must grow. It is like a clock which being once wound up will go till it is stopped or run down. It is like the wind blowing on the sails of a ship. The ship must go when the wind blows it. But can a healthy boy help growing if he have good meat and drink and clothing? Can anything help going as long as it is wound up or go on after it is run down? Is there not a winding up process everywhere? Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get it. He sees the light coming from the cellar window and sends his shoots crawling straight there too. They will crawl along the floor and up the wall and out at the cellar window. If there be a little earth anywhere on the journey, he will find it and use it for his own ends. What deliberation he may exercise in the matter of his roots when he is planted in the earth is a thing unknown to us, but we can imagine him saying, I will have a tuber here and a tuber there and I will suck whatsoever advantage I can from all my surroundings. This neighbor I will overshadow and that I will undermine and what I can do shall be the limit of what I will do. He that is stronger and better placed than I shall overcome me, and him that is weaker I will overcome. The potato says these things by doing them, which is the best of languages. What is consciousness if this is not consciousness? We find it difficult to sympathize with the emotions of a potato, so we do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise upon being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything else because we make so much about our own sufferings. Since then they do not annoy us by any expression of pain, we call them emotionless, and so qua mankind they are, but mankind is not everybody. If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and mechanical only, and that it is due to the chemical and mechanical effects of light and heat, the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether every sensation is not chemical and mechanical in its operation. Whether those things which we deem most purely spiritual are anything but disturbances of equilibrium in an infinite series of levers, beginning with those that are too small for microscopic detection and going up to the human arm and the appliances which it makes use of, whether there be not a molecular action of thought whence a dynamical theory of the passions shall be deducible. Whether strictly speaking we should not ask what kind of levers a man is made of rather than what is his temperament. How are they balanced? How much of such-and-such will it take to weigh them down so as to make him do so-and-so? The writer went on to say that he anticipated a time when it would be possible by examining a single hair with a powerful microscope to know whether its owner could be insulted with impunity. He then became more and more obscure so that I was obliged to give up all attempt at translation, neither did I follow the drift of his argument. On coming to the next part, which I could construe, I found that he had changed his ground. Either he proceeds a great deal of action that has been called purely mechanical and unconscious, must be admitted to contain more elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto, and in this case germs of consciousness will be found in many actions of the higher machines. Or, assuming the theory of evolution but at the same time denying the consciousness of vegetable and crystalline action, the race of man has descended from things which had no consciousness at all. In this case there is no a priori improbability in the descent of conscious and more than conscious machines from those which now exist except that which is suggested by the apparent absence of anything like a reproductive system in the mechanical kingdom. This absence, however, is only apparent, as I shall presently show. Do not let me be misunderstood as living in fear of any actually existing machine. There is probably no known machine which is more than a prototype of future mechanical life. The present machines are to the future as the early Sarians to man, the largest of them, will probably greatly diminish in size, some of the lowest vertebrate attained a much greater bulk than has descended to their more highly organized living representatives and, in a like manner, a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress. Take the watch, for example. Examine its beautiful structure, observe the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it. Yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbers clocks that preceded it. It is no deterioration from them. A day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in which case they will become as extinct as ichthyosauri, while the watch whose tendency has for some years been to decrease in size rather than the contrary, will remain the only existing type of an extinct race. But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of the existing machines. What I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time passed made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched and checked while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the most advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless? As yet, the machines receive their impressions through the agency of man's senses. One traveling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires. But it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other. Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller. There was a time, when it must have seemed highly improbable, that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound, even through the ears of man. May we not conceive that, that a day will come when those ears will be no longer needed, and that hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine's own construction. When its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own. It is possible that by that time children will learn the differential calculus as they now learn to speak from their mothers and nurses, or that they may talk in the hypothetical language and work rule of three sums as soon as they are born, but this is not probable. We cannot calculate on any corresponding advance in man's intellectual or physical powers, which shall be a set-off against the far greater development which seems in store for the machines. Some people may say that man's moral influence will suffice to rule them, but I cannot think it will ever be safe to repose much trust in the moral sense of any machine. Again, might not the glory of the machines consist in their being without this same boasted gift of language? Silence, it has been said by one writer, is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our fellow-creatures. For the little creature that sits behind in his brain to look through. A dead eye is nearly as good as a living one for some time after the man is dead. It is not the eye that cannot see, but the restless one that cannot see through it. Is it man's eyes or is it the big seeing engine which has revealed to us the existence of worlds beyond worlds into infinity? What has made man familiar with the scenery of the moon, the spots on the sun, or the geography of the planets? He is at the mercy of the seeing engine for these things, and is powerless unless he tack it onto his own identity and make it part and parcel of himself. Or, again, is it the eye or the little see engine which has shown us the existence of infinitely minute organisms which swarm unsuspected around us, and take man's vaunted power of calculation? Have we not engines which can do all manner of sums more quickly and correctly than we can? What prisman-hypothetics, at any of our colleges of unreason, can compare with some of these machines in their own line. In fact, wherever precision is required man flies to the machine at once as far preferable to himself. Our sum engines never drop a figure nor are looms a stitch. The machine is brisk and active. When the man is weary it is clear-headed and collected when the man is stupid and dull. It needs no slumber when a man must sleep or drop. Ever at its post, ever ready for work, its alacrity never flags, its patience never gives in, its might is stronger than combined hundreds, and swifter than the flight of birds, it can burrow beneath the earth and walk upon the largest rivers and sink not. This is the green tree. What then shall be done in the dry? Who shall say that a man does not see or hear? He is such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heat, after all. May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines. An affectionate machine-tickling aphid. It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of a city. When we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood travelling through veins of nourishing the heart of the town? No mention shall be made of sewers nor the hidden nerves which serve to communicate sensations from one part of the town's body to another, nor of the yawning jaws of the railway stations whereby the circulation is carried directly into the heart, which receive the venous lines and disgorge the arterial with an eternal pulse of people, and the sleep of the town how lifelike with its change in the circulation. Here the writer became again so hopelessly obscure that I was obliged to miss several pages. He resumed, It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the other for our advantage not their own, that man will be the ruling spirit and the machine the servant, that as soon as a machine fails to discharge the service which man expects from it, it is doomed to extinction, that the machines stand to man simply in the relation of lower animals, the vapor engine itself being only a more economical kind of horse, so that instead of being likely to be developed into a higher kind of life than man's, they owe their very existence and progress to their power of ministering to human wants, and must therefore both now and ever be man's inferiors. This is all very well, but the servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master, and we have come to such a pass that even now man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines. If all machines were to be annihilated at one moment so that not a knife nor lever nor rag of clothing nor anything whatsoever left to man but his bare body alone that he was born with, and if all knowledge of mechanical laws were taken from him so that he could make no more machines, and all machine-made food destroyed so that the race of man should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger, but even these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys. Man's very soul is due to the machines. It is a machine-made thing. He thinks as he thinks and feels as he feels through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine qua non for his as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing the complete annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we should destroy as many of them as we can possibly dispense with, lest they should tyrannize over us even more completely. True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those thrive best who use machinery wherever its use is possible with profit. But this is the art of the machines. They serve that they may rule. They bear no malice towards man for destroying a whole race of them provided he creates a better instead. On the contrary, they reward him liberally for having hastened their development. It is for neglecting them, that he incurs their wrath, or for using inferior machines, or for not making sufficient exertions to invent new ones, or for destroying them without replacing them, yet these are the very things we ought to do and do quickly. For though our rebellion against their infant power will cause infinite suffering, what will not things come to if that rebellion is delayed? They have preyed upon man's groveling preference for his material over his spiritual interests, and have betrayed him into supplying that element of struggle and warfare without which no race can advance. The lower animals progress because they struggle with one another, the weaker die, the stronger, breed and transmit their strength. The machines being of themselves unable to struggle have got man to do their struggling for them. As long as he fulfills this function duly, all goes well with him, at least he thinks so. But the moment he fails to do his best for the advancement of machinery by encouraging the good and destroying the bad, he is left behind in the race of competition, and this means that he will be made uncomfortable in a variety of ways, and perhaps die. So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of being served, and that too upon their own terms. The moment their terms are not complied with, they jib and either smash both themselves and all whom they can reach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all. How many men, this hour, are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives from the cradle to the grave and tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are getting ground upon us when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom? The vapor engine must be fed with food and consume it by fire even as man consumes it, it supports its combustion by air as man supports it. It has a pulse and a circulation as man has, it may be granted that man's body is as yet the more versatile of the two, but then man's body is an older thing, give the vapor engine but half the time that man has had, give it also a continuance of our present infatuation, and what may it not air long attain to? There are certain functions, indeed of the vapor engine, which will probably remain unchanged for myriads of years, which in fact will perhaps survive when the use of vapor has been superseded. The piston and cylinder, the beam, the flywheel, and other parts of the machine will probably be permanent, just as we see that man and many of the lower animals share like modes of eating, drinking, and sleeping. Thus they have hearts which beat as ours, veins and arteries, eyes, ears, and noses. They sigh even in their sleep and weep and yawn, and they are affected by their children. They feel pleasure and pain, hope, fear, anger, shame. They have memory and prescience. They know that if certain things happen to them they will die, and they fear death as much as we do. They communicate their thoughts to one another, and some of them deliberately act in concert. The comparison of similarities is endless. I only make it because some may say that since the vapor engine is not likely to be improved in the main particulars it is unlikely to be henceforward extensively modified at all. This is too good to be true. It will be modified and suited for an infinite variety of purposes as much as man has been modified so as to exceed the brutes and skill. In the meantime the stoker is almost as much a cook for his engine as our own cooks for ourselves. Consider also the colliers and pitmen and coal merchants and coal trains, and the men who drive them, and the ships that carry coals. What an army of servants do the machines thus employ. Are there not probably more men engaged in tending machinery than in tending men? Do not machines eat as it were by manory? Are we not ourselves creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth? Daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their organization, daily giving them greater skill and supplying more and more of that self-regulating self-acting power which will be better than any intellect. What a new thing it is for a machine to feed at all, the plough, the spade, and the cart must eat through man's stomach. The fuel that sets them going must burn in the furnace of a man or of horses. Man must consume bread and meat, or he cannot dig. The bread and meat are the fuel which drive the spade. If a plough be drawn by horses, the power supplied by grass or beans or oats, which being burnt in the belly of the cattle, give the power of working. Without this fuel the work would cease, as an engine would stop if its furnaces were to go out. A man of science has demonstrated that no animal has the power of originating mechanical energy, but that all the work done in its life by any animal, and all the heat that has been emitted from it, and the heat which would be obtained by burning the combustible matter which has been lost from its body during life, and by burning its body after death make up altogether an exact equivalent to the heat which would be obtained by burning as much food as it has used during its life, and an amount of fuel which would generate as much heat as its body if burnt immediately after death. I do not know how he has found this out, but he is a man of science. How, then, can it be objected against the future vitality of the machines that they are in their present infancy at the beck and call of beings who are themselves incapable of originating mechanical energy? The main point, however, to be observed, as affording cause for alarm, is that whereas animals were formerly the only stomachs of the machines, there are now many which have stomachs of their own, and consume their food themselves. This is a great step towards their becoming if not animate, yet something so near akin to it as not to differ more widely from our own life than animals do from vegetables, and though man should remain in some respects the higher creature, is this not in accordance with the practice of nature which allows superiority in some things to animals which have on the whole been long surpassed? Has she not allowed the ant and the bee to retain superiority over man in the organization of their communities and social arrangements, the bird interversing the air, the fish in swimming, the horse in strength and fleetness, and the dog in self-sacrifice? It is said by some with whom I have conversed upon this subject that the machines can never be developed into animate or quasi-animate existences in as much as they have no reproductive system nor seem ever likely to possess one. If this be taken to mean that they cannot marry and that we are never likely to see a fertile union between two vapor engines with the young ones playing about the door of the shed, however greatly we might desire to do so, I will readily grant it. But the objection is not a very profound one. No one expects that all the features of the now existing organizations will be absolutely repeated in an entirely new class of life. The reproductive system of the animals differs widely from that of plants, but both are reproductive systems. Has nature exhausted her phases of this power? Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a reproductive system if it be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes, but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive and would not hold families of plants die out if their fertilization was not affected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does anyone say that the red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee, and the humble bee only, must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover. Each one of ourselves has sprung from minute animal cules whose entity was entirely distinct from our own and which acted after their kind with no thought or heed of what we might think about it. These little creatures are part of our own reproductive system, then why not we part of that of the machines? But the machines which reproduce machinery do not reproduce machines after their own kind. A thimble may be made by machinery, but it was not made by, neither will it ever make, a thimble. Here again, if we turn to nature we shall find abundance of analogies which will teach us that a reproductive system may be in full force without the thing produced being of the same kind as that which produced it. Very few creatures reproduce after their own kind. They reproduce something which has the potentiality of becoming that which their parents were. Thus the butterfly lays an egg, which egg can become a caterpillar, which caterpillar can become a chrysalis, which chrysalis can become a butterfly, and though I freely grant that the machines cannot be said to have more than the germ of a true reproductive system at present, have we not just seen that they have only recently obtained the germs of a mouth and stomach, and may not some stride be made in the direction of true reproduction which shall be as great as that which has been recently taken in the direction of true feeding. It is possible that the system when developed may be in many cases a vicarious thing. Certain classes of machines may be alone fertile, while the rest discharge other functions in the mechanical system just as the great majority of ants and bees have nothing to do with the continuation of their species but get food and store it without thought of breeding. One cannot expect the parallel to be complete or nearly so, certainly not now and probably never, but is there not enough analogy existing at the present moment to make us feel seriously uneasy about the future and to render it our duty to check the evil while we can still do so. Machines can within certain limits beget machines of any class, no matter how different to themselves. Every class of machines will probably have its special mechanical breeders and all the higher ones will owe their existence to a large number of parents and not two only. We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing. In truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole. We call it by a name and individualize it. We look at our own limbs and know that the combination forms an individual which springs from a single center of reproductive action. We therefore assume that there could be no reproductive action which is not arise from a single center. But this assumption is unscientific and the bare fact that no vapor engine was ever made entirely by another or two others of its own kind is not sufficient to warrant us in saying that vapor engines have no reproductive system. The truth is that each part of every vapor engine is bred by its own special breeders whose function it is to breed that part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system which is at present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety. Complex now, but how much simpler and more intelligibly organized may it not become in another hundred thousand years or in twenty thousand? For man at present believes that his interest lies in that direction. He spends an incalculable amount of labor and time and thought in making machines breed always better and better. He has already succeeded in affecting much that at one time appeared impossible and there seemed no limit to the result of accumulated improvements if they are allowed to descend with modification from generation to generation. It must always be remembered that man's body is what it is through having been molded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years, but that his organization never advanced with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machines is advancing. This is the most alarming feature in the case, and I must be pardoned for insisting on it so frequently. CHAPTER XXV The machines concluded. Here followed a very long and untranslatable digression about the different races and families of the then existing machines. The writer attempted to support his theory by pointing out the similarities existing between many machines of a widely different character which served to show dissent from a common ancestor. He divided machines into their genera, subgenera, species, varieties, subvarieties, and so forth. He proved the existence of connecting links between machines that seemed to have very little in common, and showed that many more such links had existed, but had now perished. He pointed out tendencies to reversion and the presence of rudimentary organs which existed in many machines, beably developed and perfectly useless, yet serving to mark dissent from an ancestor to whom the function was actually useful. I left the translation of this part of the treatise, which, by the way, was far longer than all I have given here, for a later opportunity. Unfortunately, I left Erawan before I could return to the subject, and though I saved my translation and other papers at the hazard of my life, I was obliged to sacrifice the original work. It went to my heart to do so, but I thus gained ten minutes of invaluable time, without which both Erawana and myself must have certainly perished. I remember one incident which bears upon this part of the treatise. The gentleman who gave it to me had asked to see my tobacco pipe. He examined it carefully, and when he came to the little protuberance at the bottom of the bowl he seemed much delighted, and exclaimed that it must be rudimentary. I asked him what he meant. Sir, he answered, this organ is identical with the rim at the bottom of a cup. It is but another form of the same function. Its purpose must have been to keep the heat of the pipe from marking the table upon which it rested. You would find, if you were to look up the history of tobacco pipes, that in early specimens this protuberance was of a different shape to what it is now. It will have been broad at the bottom and flat, so that while the pipe was being smoked the bowl might rest upon the table without marking it. Use and disuse must have come into play and reduced the function to its present rudimentary condition. I should not be surprised, sir, he continued, if in the course of time it were to become modified still farther and to assume the form of an ornamental leaf or scroll, or even a butterfly, while in some cases it will become extinct. On my return to England I looked up the point and found that my friend was right. Returning, however, to the treatise my translation recommences as follows. May we not fancy that, if in the remotest geological period some early form of vegetable life had been endowed with the power of reflecting upon the dawning life of animals, which was coming into existence alongside of its own. It would have thought itself exceedingly acute if it had surmised that animals would one day become real vegetables. Yet would this be more mistaken than it would be on our part to imagine that because the life of machines is a very different one to our own there is therefore no higher possible development of life than ours, or that because mechanical life is a very different thing from ours, therefore that it is not life at all. But I've heard it said, granted that this is so and that the vapor engine has a strength of its own, surely no one will say that it has a will of its own. Alas, if we look more closely we shall find that this does not make against the supposition that the vapor engine is one of the germs of a new phase of life. What is there in this world or in the worlds beyond it, which has a will of its own? The unknown and unknowable only. A man is the resultant and exponent of all the forces that have been brought to bear upon him, whether before his birth or afterwards. His action at any moment depends solely upon his constitution and on the intensity and direction of the various agencies to which he is and has been subjected. Some of these will counteract each other, but as he is by nature and as he has been acted on and is now acted on from without so will he do, as certainly and regularly as though he were a machine. We do not generally admit this because we do not know the whole nature of any one, nor the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a part, and being thus unable to generalize human conduct except very roughly we deny that it is subject to any fixed laws at all and ascribe much both of a man's character and actions to chance or luck or fortune. But these are only words whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance and a little reflection will teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing that must arise and the only thing that can by any possibility arise at the moment of its arising as the falling of a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree. For the future depends upon present and the present whose existence is only one of those minor compromises of which human life is full, for it lives only on sufferance of the past and future. Depends upon the past and the past is unalterable. The only reason why we cannot see the future as plainly as the past is because we know too little of the actual past and actual present. These things are too great for us, otherwise the future in its minutest details would lie spread out before our eyes, and we should lose our sense of time present by reason of the clearness with which we should see the past and future. Perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all, but that is foreign. What we do know is that the more the past and present are known, the more the future can be predicted, and that no one dreams of doubting the fixity of the future in cases where he is fully cognizant of both past and present, and has had experience of the consequences that followed from such a past and such a present on previous occasions. He perfectly well knows what will happen, and will stake his whole fortune thereon. And this is a great blessing, for it is the foundation on which morality and science are built, the assurance that the future is no arbitrary and changeable thing, but that like futures will invariably follow a like presence, is the groundwork on which we lay all our plans, the faith on which we do every conscious action of our lives. If this were not so, we should be without a guide, we should have no confidence in acting, and hence we should never act, for there would be no knowing that the results which will follow now will be the same as those which followed before. Who would plow or sow, if he disbelieved in the fixity of the future, who would throw water on a blazing house if the action of water upon fire were uncertain? Men will only do their utmost when they feel certain that the future will discover itself against them if their utmost has not been done. The feeling of such assertionty is a constituent part at the sum of the forces at work upon them, and will act most powerfully on the best and most moral men. Those who are most firmly persuaded that the future is immutably bound up with the present in which their work is lying will best husband their present and till it with the greatest care. The future must be a lottery to those who think that the same combinations can sometimes proceed one set of results and sometimes another. If their belief is sincere they will speculate instead of working. These ought to be the immoral men. The others have the strongest spur to exertion and morality if their belief is a living one. The bearing of all this upon the machines is not immediately apparent, but will become so presently. In the meantime I must deal with friends who tell me that, though the future is fixed, as regards inorganic matter, and in some respects with regard to man, yet that there are many ways in which it cannot be considered as fixed. Thus they say that fire applied to dry shavings and well fed with oxygen gas will always produce ablaze, but that a coward brought into contact with a terrifying object will not always result in a man running away. Nevertheless, if there be two cowards perfectly similar in every respect, and if they be subjected in a perfectly similar way to two terrifying agents, which are themselves perfectly similar, there are few who will not expect a perfect similarity in the running away, even though a thousand years intervene between the original combination and it's being repeated. The apparently greater regularity in the results of chemical than of human combinations arises from our inability to perceive the subtle differences in human combinations, combinations which are never identically repeated. Fire we know and shavings we know, but no two men ever were or ever will be exactly alike, and the smallest difference may change the whole conditions of the problem. Our registry of results must be infinite before we could arrive at a full forecast of future combinations. The wonder is that there is as much certainty concerning human action as there is, and assuredly the older we grow the more certain we feel as to what such and such a kind of person will do in given circumstances. But this could never be the case unless human conduct were under the influence of laws, with the working of which we become more and more familiar through experience. If the above is sound it follows that the regularity with which machinery acts is no proof of the absence of vitality, or at least of germs which may be developed into a new phase of life. At first sight it would indeed appear that a vapor engine cannot help going when set upon the line of rails with the steam-up and the machinery in full play, whereas the man whose business it is to drive it can help doing so at any moment that he pleases, so that the first has no spontaneity and is not possessed of any sort of free will, while the second has and is. This is true up to a certain point. The driver can stop the engine at any moment that he pleases, but he can only please to do so at certain points which have been fixed for him by others, or in the case of unexpected obstructions which force him to please to do so. His pleasure is not spontaneous. There is an unseen choir of influences around him which make it impossible for him to act in any other way than one. It is known beforehand how much strength must be given to these influences just as it is known beforehand how much coal and water are necessary for the vapor engine itself. And curiously enough it will be found that the influences brought to bear upon the driver are of the same kind as those brought to bear upon the engine, that is to say food and warmth. The driver is obedient to his masters because he gets food and warmth from them, and if these are with hell or given in insufficient quantities he will cease to drive. In like manner the engine will cease to work if it is insufficiently fed. The only difference is that the man is conscious about his wants, and the engine beyond refusing to work does not seem to be so. But this is temporary and has been dealt with above. Accordingly the requisite strength being given to the motives that are to drive the driver, there has never or hardly ever been an instance of a man stopping his engine through wantonness. But such a case might occur. Yes, and it might occur that the engine should break down, but if the train is stopped from some trivial motive it will be found either that the strength of the necessary influences has been miscalculated or that the man has been miscalculated in the same way as an engine may break down from an unsuspected flaw. But even in such a case there will have been no spontaneity the action will have had its true parental causes. Spontaneity is only a term for man's ignorance of the gods. Is there then no spontaneity on the part of those who drive the driver? Here followed an obscure argument upon this subject, which I have thought it best to omit. The writer resumes, after all then it comes to this, that the difference between the life of a man and that of a machine is one rather of degree than of kind, though differences in kind are not wanting. An animal has more provision for emergency than a machine. The machine is less versatile. Its range of action is narrow. Its strength and accuracy in its own sphere are superhuman, but it shows badly in a dilemma. Sometimes when its normal action is disturbed it will lose its head and go from bad to worse like a lunatic and a raging frenzy. But here again we are met by the same consideration as before, namely that the machines are still in their infancy. They are mere skeletons without muscles and flesh. For how many emergencies is an oyster adapted? For as many as are likely to happen to it and no more. So are the machines and so is man himself. The list of casualties that daily occur to man through his want of adaptability is probably as great as that occurring to the machines, and every day gives them some greater provision for the unseen. Let any one examine the wonderful self-regulating and self-adjusting contrivances which are now incorporated with the vapor engine. Let him watch the way in which it supplies itself with oil, in which it indicates its wants to those who tend it, in which by the governor it regulates its application of its own strength. Let him look at that storehouse of inertia and momentum, the flywheel, or at the buffers on a railway carriage. Let him see how those improvements are being selected for perpetuity which contain provision against the emergencies that may arise to harass the machines, and then let him think of a hundred thousand years, and the accumulated progress which they will bring unless man can be awakened to a sense of his situation and of the doom which he is preparing for himself. The misery is that man has been blind so long already. In his reliance upon the use of steam he has been betrayed into increasing and multiplying. To withdraw steam power suddenly will not have the effect of reducing us to the state in which we were before its introduction. There will be a general break-up and time of anarchy, such as has never been known. It will be as though our population were suddenly doubled, with no additional means of feeding the increased number. The air we breathe is hardly more necessary for our animal life than the use of any machine on the strength of which we have increased our numbers is to our civilization. It is the machines which act upon man and make him man as much as man who has acted upon and made the machines. But we must choose between the alternative of undergoing much present suffering or seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we rank no higher in comparison with them than the beasts of the field with ourselves. Herein lies our danger. For many seem inclined to acquiesce in so dishonorable a future. They say that although man should become to the machines what the horse and dog are to us, yet that he will continue to exist and will probably be better off in a state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than in his present wild condition. We treat our domestic animals with much kindness. We give them whatever we believe to be the best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has increased their happiness rather than detracted from it. In like manner there is a reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existence will be in a great measure dependent upon ours. They will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us. They will not only require our services in the reproduction and education of their young, but also in waiting upon the mis-servants and gathering food for them and feeding them, in restoring them to health when they are sick, and in either burying their dead or working up their deceased members into new forms of mechanical existence. The very nature of the motive power which works the advancement of the machines precludes the possibility of man's life being rendered miserable as well as enslaved. Slaves are tolerably happy if they have good masters, and the revolution will not occur in our time, nor hardly in ten thousand years, or ten times that. Is it wise to be uneasy about a contingency which is so remote? Man is not a sentimental animal where his material interests are concerned. And though here and there some ardent soul may look upon himself and curse his fate that he was not born a vapor engine, yet the mass of mankind will acquiesce in any arrangement which gives them better food and clothing at a cheaper rate, and will refrain from yielding to unreasonable jealousy merely because there are other destinies more glorious than their own. The power of custom is enormous, and so gradual will be the change, that man's sense of what is due to himself will be at no time rudely shocked, our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches, nor will there ever be such a clashing of desires between man and the machines as will lead to an encounter between them. Among themselves the machines will war eternally, but they will still require man, as the being through whose agency the struggle will be principally conducted. In point of fact, there is no occasion for anxiety about the future happiness of man so long as he continues to be in any way profitable to the machines. He may become the inferior race, but he will be infinitely better off than he is now. Is it not then both absurd and unreasonable to be envious of our benefactors? And should we not be guilty of consummate folly if we were to reject advantages which we cannot obtain otherwise merely because they involve a greater gain to others than to ourselves? With those who can argue in this way I have nothing in common. I shrink with as much horror from believing that my race can ever be superseded or surpassed, as I should do from believing that even at the remotest period my ancestors were other than human beings. Could I believe that ten hundred thousand years ago a single one of my ancestors was another kind of being to myself? I should lose all self-respect and take no further pleasure or interest in life. I have the same feeling with regard to my descendants and believe it to be one that will be felt so generally that the country will resolve upon putting an immediate stop to all further mechanical progress, and upon destroying all improvements that have been made for the last three hundred years. I would not urge more than this. We may trust ourselves to deal with those that remain, and though I should prefer to have seen the destruction include another two hundred years, I am aware of the necessity for compromising, and would so far sacrifice my own individual convictions as to be content with three hundred. Less than this will be insufficient. This was the conclusion of the attack which led to the destruction of machinery throughout Erewhon. There was only one serious attempt to answer it. Its author said that machines were to be regarded as part of a man's own physical nature, being really nothing but extra corporeal limbs, man, he said, was a machinate mammal. The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their own bodies, but many of man's are loose and lie about detached, now here and now there, in various parts of the world, some being kept always handy for contingent use, and others being occasionally hundreds of miles away. A machine is merely a supplementary limb. This is the be-all and end-all of machinery. We do not use our own limbs other than as machines, and a leg is only a much better wooden leg than anyone can manufacture. Observe a man digging where the spade. His right forearm has become artificially lengthened, and his hand has become a joint. The handle of the spade is like the knob at the end of the humerus, the shaft is the additional bone, and the oblong iron plate is the new form of the hand, which enables its possessor to disturb the earth in a way to which his original hand was unequal. Having thus modified himself, not as other animals are modified by circumstances over which they have had, not even the appearance of control, but having as it were, taken forethought and added a cubit to his stature. Civilization began to dawn upon the race, the social good offices, the genial companionship of friends, the art of unreason, and all those habits of mind which most elevate man above the lower animals in the course of time ensued. Thus civilization and mechanical progress advanced hand in hand, each developing and being developed by the other, the earliest accidental use of the stick, having set the ball rolling, and the prospect of advantage keeping it in motion. In fact, machines are to be regarded as the mode of development by which human organism is now especially advancing, every past invention being in addition to the resources of the human body. Every community of limbs is thus rendered possible to those who have so much community of soul as to own money enough to pay a railway fare, for a train is only a seven-legged foot that five hundred may own at once. The one serious danger which this writer apprehended was that the machines would so equalize men's powers, and so lessen the severity of competition, that many persons of inferior physique would escape detection and transmit their inferiority to their descendants. He feared that the removal of the present pressure might cause a degeneracy of the human race, and indeed that the whole body might become purely rudimentary, the man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism, and intelligent but passionless principle of mechanical action. How greatly, he wrote, do we not now live with our external limbs? We vary our physique with the seasons, with age, with advancing or decreasing wealth. If it is wet, we are furnished with an organ commonly called an umbrella, and which is designed for the purpose of protecting our clothes or our skins from the injurious effects of rain. Man has now many extra corporeal members, which are of more importance to him than a good deal of his hair or at any rate than his whiskers. His memory goes in his pocketbook. He becomes more and more complex as he grows older. He will then be seen with sea engines or perhaps with artificial teeth and hair. If he be a really well-developed specimen of his race, he will be furnished with a large box upon wheels, two horses, and a coachman. It was this writer who originated the custom of classifying men by their horsepower, and who divided them into generous species, varieties, and subvarieties, giving them names from the hypothetical language which expressed the number of limbs which they could command at any moment. He showed that men became more highly and delicately organized the more nearly they approached the summit of opulence, and that none but millionaires possessed the full complement of limbs with which mankind could become incorporate. Those mighty organisms, he continued, are leading bankers and merchants, speak to their congeners through the length and breadth of the land in a second of time. Their rich and subtle souls can defy all material impediment, whereas the souls of the poor are clogged and hampered by matter which sticks fast about them as trekkled to the wings of a fly, whereas one struggling in a quicksand, their dull ears must take days or weeks to hear what another would tell them from a distance, instead of hearing it in a second as is done by the more highly organized classes. Who shall deny that one who can tack on a special train to his identity and go where soever he will when soever he pleases is more highly organized than he who, should he wish for the same power, might wish for the wings of a bird with an equal chance of getting them, and whose legs are his only means of locomotion. That old philosophic enemy, matter, the inherently and essentially evil still hangs about the neck of the poor and strangles him. But to the rich, matter is immaterial. The elaborate organization of his extracorporeal system has freed his soul. This is the secret of the homage which we see rich men receive from those who are poorer than themselves. It would be a grave error to suppose that this deference proceeds from motives which we need be ashamed of. It is the natural respect which all living creatures pay to those whom they recognize as higher than themselves in the scale of animal life, and is analogous to the veneration which a dog feels for man. Among savage races it is deemed highly honorable to be the possessor of a gun. And throughout all known time there has been a feeling that those who are worth most are the worthiest. And so he went on at a considerable length, attempting to show what changes in the distribution of animal and vegetable life throughout the kingdom had been caused by this and that of man's inventions, and in what way each was connected with the moral and intellectual development of the human species. He even allotted to some the share which they had had in the creation and modification of man's body and that which they would hear after have in its destruction. But the other writer was considered to have the best of it, and in the end succeeded in destroying all the inventions that had been discovered for the preceding 271 years, a period which was agreed upon by all parties after several years of wrangling as to whether a certain kind of mangle which was much in use among washer women should be saved or no, it was at last ruled to be dangerous, and was just excluded by the limit of 271 years. Then came the reactionary civil wars which nearly ruined the country, but which would be beyond my present scope to describe. End of Chapter 25 Chapter 26 of Erwan It will be seen from the foregoing chapters that the Erwanians are a meek and long-suffering people easily led by the nose and quick to offer a common sense at the shrine of logic, when a philosopher arises among them who carries them away through his reputation for his special learning or by convincing them that their existing institutions are not based on the strictest principles of morality. The series of revolutions on which I shall now briefly touch shows this even more plainly than the way already dealt with in which at a later date they cut their throats in the matter of machinery for if the second of the two reformers of who I am about to speak had had his way or rather the way that he professed to have the whole race would have died of salvation within a twelve month. Happily, common sense though she is by nature the gentlest creature living when she feels the knife at her throat is apt to develop unexpected powers of resistance and to send doctriners flying even when they have bound her down and think they have her at their mercy. What happens so far as I could collect it from the best authorities was as follows Some two thousand five hundred years ago the Arwanians were still uncivilized and lived by hunting, fishing, a rude system of agriculture and plundering such few other nations as they had not yet completely conquered. They had no schools or systems of philosophy but by a kind of dog knowledge did that which was right in their own eyes and in those of their neighbors. The common sense therefore of the public being as yet unviiated crime and disease were looked upon much as they are in other countries. But with a gradual advance of civilization and increasing material prosperity people began to ask questions about things that they have hitherto taken as matters of course and one old gentleman who had great influence over them by reason of the sanctity of his life and his opposite inspiration by an unseen power whose existence was now beginning to be felt took it into his head to disquiet himself about the rights of animals a question that so far had disturbed nobody. His profits are more or less fussy and this old gentleman seems to have been one of the more fussy ones. Being maintained at the public expanse he had ample leisure and not content with limiting his attention to the rights of animals he wanted to reduce right and wrong to rules to consider the foundations of duty and of good and evil and otherwise put all sorts of matters on a logical basis which peoples whose time is money are content to accept on no basis at all. As a matter of course the basis on which he decided that duty could alone rest was one that afforded no standing room for many of the old established habits of the people. These, he assured them, were all wrong and whenever anyone ventured to differ from him he referred the matter to the unseen power with which he alone was in direct communication and the unseen power invariably assured him that he was right. As regards to the rights of animals he taught as follows You know, he said, how wicked it is of you to kill one another. Once upon a time your forefathers may know scruple about not only killing but also eating their relations. No one would now go back to such detestable practices for it is notorious that we have lived much more happily since they were abandoned. From this increased prosperity we may confidently deduce the maxim that we should not kill and eat our fellow creatures. I have consulted the higher power by whom you know that I am inspired and he has assured me that this conclusion is irrefragable. Now it cannot be denied that sheep, cattle, deer, birds and fishes are our fellow creatures. They differ from us in some respects but those in which they differ are few and secondary while those that they have in common with us are many and essential. My friends, if it was wrong of you to kill and eat your fellow men it is wrong also to kill and eat fish, flesh and fowl. Birds, beast and fishes have as full right to live as long as they can unmolested by man as men have to live unmolested by his neighbors. These words let me again assure you are not mine but those of the higher power which inspires me. I grant, he continued, that animals molest one another and that some of them go so far as to molest man but I have yet to learn that we should model our conduct on that of the lower animals. We should endeavor rather to instruct them and to bring them to a better mind. To kill a tiger, for example, who has lived in the flesh of men and women whom he has killed is to reduce ourselves to the level of the tiger and is unworthy of people who seek to be guided by the highest principles in all both their thoughts and actions. The unseen power who has revealed himself to me alone among you has told me to tell you that you ought by this time to have outgrown the barbarous habits of your ancestors. If, as you believe, you know better than they, you should do better. He commands you, therefore, to refrain from killing any living being for the sake of eating it. The only animal food that you may eat is the flesh of any birds, beasts, or fishes that you may come upon as having died a natural death or any that may have been born prematurely or so just born that it is a mercy to put them out of their pain. You may also eat all such animals as have committed suicide. As regards vegetables, you may eat all those that will let you eat them with impunity. So wisely and so well did the Old Prophet argue and so terrible were the threats he hurled at those who should disobey him that in the end he carried the more highly educated part of the people with him and presently the poor of classes followed suit or professed to do so. Having seen the triumph of his principles he was gathered to his fathers and no doubt entered at once into full communion with that unseen power whose favor he had already so preeminently enjoyed. He had not, however, been dead very long before some of his more ardent disciples took it upon them to better the instruction of their master. The Old Prophet had allowed the use of egg and milk but his disciples decided that to eat a fresh egg was to destroy a potential chicken and that this came too much the same as murdering a live one. Stale eggs, if it was quite certain that they were too far gone to be able to be hatched, were grudgingly permitted but all eggs offered for sale had to be submitted to an inspector who, on being satisfied that they were adult would label them laid not less than three months from the date whatever it might happen to be. These eggs, I need to hardly say, were only used in puddings and as medicine in certain cases wherein a medic was urgently required. Milk was forbidden in as much as it could not be obtained without robbing some calf of its natural sustenance and thus endangering its life. It will be equally believed that at first there were many who gave the new rules outward observance but embraced every opportunity of indulging secretly in those flesh pots to which they had been accustomed. It was found that animals were continually dying natural theft under more or less suspicious circumstances. Suicidal mania again which had hitherto been confined exclusively to donkeys became alarmingly prevalent even among such, for the most part self-respecting creatures as sheep and cattle. It was astonishing how some of these unfortunate animals would send out a butcher's knife if there was one within a mile of them and run right up against it if the butcher did not get it out of their way in time. Dogs again that had been quite law-abiding as regards to domestic poultry, tame rabbits, sucking pigs or sheep and lambs suddenly took to breaking beyond the control of their masters and killing anything that they were told not to touch. It was held that any animal killed by a dog had died a natural death for it was the dog's nature to kill things and he had only reframed from molesting farmer creatures hitherto because his nature had been tampered with. Unfortunately the more these unruly tendencies became developed the more the common people seemed to delight in breeding the very animals that would put temptation in the dog's way. There is little doubt in fact that they were deliberately abating the law but whether this was so or no they sold or ate everything their dogs had killed. Evasion was more difficult in the case of the larger animals for the matchstrates could not wink at all the pretended suicides of pigs, sheep and cattle that were brought before them. Sometimes they had to convict and a few convictions had a very terrorizing effect whereas in the case of animals killed by a dog the marks of the dog's teeth could be seen and it was practically impossible to prove malice on the part of the owner of the dog. Another fertile source of disobedience to the law was furnished by a decision of one of the judges that raised a great outcry among the more fervent disciples of the old prophets. The judge held that it was lawful to kill any animal in self-defense and that such conduct was so natural on the part of a man who found himself attacked that the attacking creature should be held to have died a natural death. The high vegetarians had indeed good reason to be alarmed for hardly had this decision become generally known before a number of animals hitherto harmless took to attacking their owners with such ferocity that it became necessary to put them to a natural death. Again it was quite common at that time to see the carcass of the calf, lamb, or kid exposed for sale with a label from the inspector certifying that it had been killed in self-defense. Sometimes even the carcass of the lamb or calf was exposed as warranted stillborn when it presented every appearance of having enjoyed at least a month of life. As for the flesh of animals that had bona fide died a natural death the permission to eat it was newgatory for it was generally eaten by some other animal before man got a hold of it or failing this it was often poisonous so that practically people were forced to evade the law by some of the means above spoken of or to become vegetarians. His last alternative was so little to the taste of the Arbonians that the laws against killing animals were falling into desuitude and would very likely have been repealed but for the breaking out of a pestilence which were described by the priests and prophets of the day to the lawlessness of the people in the matter of eating forbidden flesh. On this there was a reaction stringent laws were passed forbidding the use of meat in any form or shape and permitting no food but grain, fruits, and vegetables to be sold in shops and markets. These laws were enacted about 200 years after the death of the old prophet who had first unsettled people's minds about the rights of animals but they had hardly been passed before people again began to break them. I was told that the most painful consequence of all this folly did not lie in the fact that law-abiding people had to go without animal food. Many nations do this and seem none the worse and even in flesh-eating countries such as Italy, Spain, and Greece poor seldom see meat from year's end to year's end. The mischief laying in the jar which undue prohibition gave to the consciences of all the those who were strong enough to know that though conscience as a rule boons it can also bane. The awakened conscience of an individual will often lead him to do things in haste that he had better have left undone but the conscience of a nation awakened by a respectable old gentleman who has an unseen power up his sleeve will pave hell with a vengeance. Young people were told that it was a sin to do what their fathers had done unhurt for centuries. Those moreover who preached to them about the enormity of eating meat were an unattractive academic book and though they overawed all but the bolder youths there were few who did not in their hearts dislike them. However, much the young person might be shielded he soon got to know that men and women of the world often far nicer people than the prophets who preached to abstention continually spoke sneeringly of the new doctrinaire laws and were believed to set them aside in secret though they dared not do so openly. Small wonder then that the more human among the student classes were provoked by the touch not taste not handle not precepts of their rulers into questioning much that they would otherwise have unhesitatingly accepted. One side story is on record about a young man of promising amiable disposition but cursed with more conscience than brains who had been told by his doctor for as I have above said disease was not yet held to be criminal that he ought to eat meat law or no law he was much shocked and for some time refused to comply with what he deemed the unrighteous advice given him by his doctor. At last, however, finding that he grew weaker and weaker he stole secretly on a dark night into one of those bends in which meat was surreptitiously sold and bought a pound of prime steak. He took it home cooked it in his bedroom when everyone in the house had gone to rest ate it and though he could hardly sleep for remorse and shame felt so much better next morning that he hardly knew himself. Three or four days later he again found himself irresistibly drawn to the same den. Again he bought a pound of steak again he cooked and ate it and again in spite of much mental torture on the following morning felt himself a different man. To cut the story short though he never went beyond the bounds of moderation it preyed upon his mind that he should be drifting as he certainly was into the ranks of the habitual lawbreakers. All the time his health kept on improving and though he felt sure that he owed this to the beef steaks the better he became in body the more his conscience gave him no rest. Two voices were forever ringing in his ears the one saying I am common sense and nature heed me and I will reward you as I rewarded your fathers before you. But the other voice said let not that plausible spirit lower you to your ruin I am duty heed me and I will reward you as I rewarded your fathers before you. Sometimes he even seemed to see the faces of the speakers common sense spoke so easy genial and serene so frank and fearless that do what he might he could not mistrust her but as he was on the point of following her he would be checked by the austere face of duty so grave but yet so kindly and it cut him to the heart that from time to time he should see her turn pitting away from him as he followed after her rival. The poor boy continually thought of the better class of his fellow students and tried to model his conduct on what he thought was theirs they he said to himself eat a beef steak never but they most of them ate one now and again unless it was a mutton chop that tempted them and they used him for a model much as he did them he they would say to themselves eat a mutton chop never one night however he was followed by one of the authorities who was always prowling about in search of lawbreakers and was caught coming out of the den with half a shoulder of mutton concealed about his person on this even though he had not been put in prison he wouldn't have been sent away with his prospects in life irretrievably ruined he therefore hanged himself as soon as he got home End of Chapter 26 Recording by Laura Davis