Chapter XXV: The Book of 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 descent 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 feebly
developed and perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent 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 that I have given here, for a later
opportunity. Unfortunately, I left Erewhon before I could return
to the subject; and though I saved my translation and other papers
at the hazard of my life, I was a 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 Arowhena 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 have heard it said, 'granted that this is so, and that the
vapour-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
vapour-engine is one of the germs of a new phase of life. What is
there in this whole 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 generalise 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 the 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
cognisant 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 like presents, 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 plough 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 a certainty
is a constituent part of 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 precede 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 a blaze, 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 its
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 vapour-engine cannot help going
when set upon a 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 vapour-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 withheld 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 in 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 unforeseen. Let any one examine the wonderful
self-regulating and self-adjusting contrivances which are now
incorporated with the vapour-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 store-house
of inertia and momentum the fly-wheel, 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. {6}
"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 civilisation; 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
dishonourable 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 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 them as
servants; in 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 vapour-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 a part of 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 any one can manufacture.
"Observe a man digging with a spade; his right fore-arm 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, civilisation 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 civilisation 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 an addition
to the resources of the human body. Even 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-leagued foot that five hundred may own at once."
The one serious danger which this writer apprehended was that the
machines would so equalise 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, an 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 pocket-book.
He becomes more and more complex as he grows older; he will then be
seen with see-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 horse-power, and who divided them into genera, 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 organised 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, "our 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
treacle to the wings of a fly, or as 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 organised classes. Who shall deny that one
who can tack on a special train to his identity, and go wheresoever
he will whensoever he pleases, is more highly organised 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 organisation of his extra-corporeal 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 recognise 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 honourable 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 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 hereafter 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 washerwomen
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
it would be beyond my present scope to describe.
Erewhon : Chapter XXVI - The Views of an Erewhonian Prophet Concerning the Rights of Animals
Erewhon