"
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.
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