We Take It That When The State Of Things Shall Have Arrived Which We
Have Been Above Attempting To Describe, Man Will Have Become To The
Machine What The Horse And The Dog Are To Man.
He will continue to
exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his
state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than
he is in his present wild state.
We treat our horses, dogs, cattle,
and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness; we give them whatever
experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt
that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals
far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is
reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for
their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower
animals. They cannot kill us and eat us as we do sheep; they will
not only require our services in the parturition of their young
(which branch of their economy will remain always in our hands), but
also in feeding them, in setting them right when they are sick, and
burying their dead or working up their corpses into new machines. It
is obvious that if all the animals in Great Britain save man alone
were to die, and if at the same time all intercourse with foreign
countries were by some sudden catastrophe to be rendered perfectly
impossible, it is obvious that under such circumstances the loss of
human life would be something fearful to contemplate - in like manner
were mankind to cease, the machines would be as badly off or even
worse. The fact is that our interests are inseparable from theirs,
and theirs from ours. Each race is dependent upon the other for
innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the
machines have been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able
to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the
continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may be
ultimately developed, inasmuch as man's interest lies in that
direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire
more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is
true that machinery is even at this present time employed in
begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after
its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony
appear to be very remote, and indeed can hardly be realised by our
feeble and imperfect imagination.
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by
day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily
bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the
energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.
The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come
when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its
inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a
moment question.
Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed
against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the
well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no
quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of
the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present
condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is
already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that
we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to
destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely
acquiescent in our bondage.
For the present we shall leave this subject, which we present gratis
to the members of the Philosophical Society. Should they consent to
avail themselves of the vast field which we have pointed out, we
shall endeavour to labour in it ourselves at some future and
indefinite period.
I am, Sir, etc.,
CELLARIUS
LUCUBRATIO EBRIA
"Lucubratio Ebria," like "Darwin Among the Machines," has already
appeared in THE NOTE-BOOKS OF SAMUEL BUTLER with a prefatory note by
Mr. Festing Jones, explaining its connection with EREWHON and LIFE
AND HABIT. I need therefore only repeat that it was written by
Butler after his return to England and sent to New Zealand, where it
was published in the PRESS on July 29, 1865.
There is a period in the evening, or more generally towards the still
small hours of the morning, in which we so far unbend as to take a
single glass of hot whisky and water. We will neither defend the
practice nor excuse it. We state it as a fact which must be borne in
mind by the readers of this article; for we know not how, whether it
be the inspiration of the drink or the relief from the harassing work
with which the day has been occupied or from whatever other cause,
yet we are certainly liable about this time to such a prophetic
influence as we seldom else experience. We are rapt in a dream such
as we ourselves know to be a dream, and which, like other dreams, we
can hardly embody in a distinct utterance. We know that what we see
is but a sort of intellectual Siamese twins, of which one is
substance and the other shadow, but we cannot set either free without
killing both. We are unable to rudely tear away the veil of phantasy
in which the truth is shrouded, so we present the reader with a
draped figure, and his own judgment must discriminate between the
clothes and the body. A truth's prosperity is like a jest's, it lies
in the ear of him that hears it. Some may see our lucubration as we
saw it, and others may see nothing but a drunken dream or the
nightmare of a distempered imagination.
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