On my return to the metropolis, during the remaining weeks or rather days
of my sojourn in Erewhon 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 found translation impossible, substituted purely
English names and ideas for the original Erewhonian ones, but the reader
may rely on my general accuracy. I have thought it best to insert my
translation here.
CHAPTER XXIII: 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 if 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.
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