"
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.
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