When we look down from a high place upon crowded
thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood
travelling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town? No
mention shall be made of sewers, nor of 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 life-like! 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 vapour-
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.
Pages:
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276