Of genius they make no account, for they say that every one is a
genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him
will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some
part of him will be healthy—so no man is so mentally and morally sound,
but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad
and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like
manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is
not also a genius.
When I talked about originality and genius to some gentlemen whom I met
at a supper party given by Mr. Thims in my honour, and said that
original thought ought to be encouraged, I had to eat my words at once.
Their view evidently was that genius was like offences—needs must that
it come, but woe unto that man through whom it comes. A man’s business,
they hold, is to think as his neighbours do, for Heaven help him if he
thinks good what they count bad. And really it is hard to see how the
Erewhonian theory differs from our own, for the word “idiot” only means
a person who forms his opinions for himself.
The venerable Professor of Worldly Wisdom, a man verging on eighty but
still hale, spoke to me very seriously on this subject in consequence
of the few words that I had imprudently let fall in defence of genius.
He was one of those who carried most weight in the university, and had
the reputation of having done more perhaps than any other living man to
suppress any kind of originality.
“It is not our business,” he said, “to help students to think for
themselves. Surely this is the very last thing which one who wishes
them well should encourage them to do. Our duty is to ensure that they
shall think as we do, or at any rate, as we hold it expedient to say we
do.” In some respects, however, he was thought to hold somewhat radical
opinions, for he was President of the Society for the Suppression of
Useless Knowledge, and for the Completer Obliteration of the Past.
As regards the tests that a youth must pass before he can get a degree,
I found that they have no class lists, and discourage anything like
competition among the students; this, indeed, they regard as
self-seeking and unneighbourly. The examinations are conducted by way
of papers written by the candidate on set subjects, some of which are
known to him beforehand, while others are devised with a view of
testing his general capacity and _savoir faire_.
My friend the Professor of Worldly Wisdom was the terror of the greater
number of students; and, so far as I could judge, he very well might
be, for he had taken his Professorship more seriously than any of the
other Professors had done. I heard of his having plucked one poor
fellow for want of sufficient vagueness in his saving clauses paper.
Another was sent down for having written an article on a scientific
subject without having made free enough use of the words “carefully,”
“patiently,” and “earnestly.” One man was refused a degree for being
too often and too seriously in the right, while a few days before I
came a whole batch had been plucked for insufficient distrust of
printed matter.
About this there was just then rather a ferment, for it seems that the
Professor had written an article in the leading university magazine,
which was well known to be by him, and which abounded in all sorts of
plausible blunders. He then set a paper which afforded the examinees an
opportunity of repeating these blunders—which, believing the article to
be by their own examiner, they of course did. The Professor plucked
every single one of them, but his action was considered to have been
not quite handsome.
I told them of Homer’s noble line to the effect that a man should
strive ever to be foremost and in all things to outvie his peers; but
they said that no wonder the countries in which such a detestable maxim
was held in admiration were always flying at one another’s throats.
“Why,” asked one Professor, “should a man want to be better than his
neighbours? Let him be thankful if he is no worse.”
I ventured feebly to say that I did not see how progress could be made
in any art or science, or indeed in anything at all, without more or
less self-seeking, and hence unamiability.
“Of course it cannot,” said the Professor, “and therefore we object to
progress.”
After which there was no more to be said. Later on, however, a young
Professor took me aside and said he did not think I quite understood
their views about progress.
“We like progress,” he said, “but it must commend itself to the common
sense of the people. If a man gets to know more than his neighbours he
should keep his knowledge to himself till he has sounded them, and seen
whether they agree, or are likely to agree with him. He said it was as
immoral to be too far in front of one’s own age, as to lag too far
behind it. If a man can carry his neighbours with him, he may say what
he likes; but if not, what insult can be more gratuitous than the
telling them what they do not want to know? A man should remember that
intellectual over-indulgence is one of the most insidious and
disgraceful forms that excess can take. Granted that every one should
exceed more or less, inasmuch as absolutely perfect sanity would drive
any man mad the moment he reached it, but . . . ”
He was now warming to his subject and I was beginning to wonder how I
should get rid of him, when the party broke up, and though I promised
to call on him before I left, I was unfortunately prevented from doing
so.
I have now said enough to give English readers some idea of the strange
views which the Erewhonians hold concerning unreason, hypothetics, and
education generally. In many respects they were sensible enough, but I
could not get over the hypothetics, especially the turning their own
good poetry into the hypothetical language. In the course of my stay I
met one youth who told me that for fourteen years the hypothetical
language had been almost the only thing that he had been taught,
although he had never (to his credit, as it seemed to me) shown the
slightest proclivity towards it, while he had been endowed with not
inconsiderable ability for several other branches of human learning. He
assured me that he would never open another hypothetical book after he
had taken his degree, but would follow out the bent of his own
inclinations. This was well enough, but who could give him his fourteen
years back again?
I sometimes wondered how it was that the mischief done was not more
clearly perceptible, and that the young men and women grew up as
sensible and goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost
deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless
received damage, from which they suffered to their life’s end; but many
seemed little or none the worse, and some, almost the better. The
reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads in most
cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that do what the
teachers might they could never get them to pay serious heed to it. The
consequence was that the boys only lost their time, and not so much of
this as might have been expected, for in their hours of leisure they
were actively engaged in exercises and sports which developed their
physical nature, and made them at any rate strong and healthy.
Moreover those who had any special tastes could not be restrained from
developing them: they would learn what they wanted to learn and liked,
in spite of obstacles which seemed rather to urge them on than to
discourage them, while for those who had no special capacity, the loss
of time was of comparatively little moment; but in spite of these
alleviations of the mischief, I am sure that much harm was done to the
children of the sub-wealthy classes, by the system which passes current
among the Erewhonians as education. The poorest children suffered
least—if destruction and death have heard the sound of wisdom, to a
certain extent poverty has done so also.
And yet perhaps, after all, it is better for a country that its seats
of learning should do more to suppress mental growth than to encourage
it. Were it not for a certain priggishness which these places infuse
into so great a number of their _alumni_, genuine work would become
dangerously common. It is essential that by far the greater part of
what is said or done in the world should be so ephemeral as to take
itself away quickly; it should keep good for twenty-four hours, or even
twice as long, but it should not be good enough a week hence to prevent
people from going on to something else. No doubt the marvellous
development of journalism in England, as also the fact that our seats
of learning aim rather at fostering mediocrity than anything higher, is
due to our subconscious recognition of the fact that it is even more
necessary to check exuberance of mental development than to encourage
it. There can be no doubt that this is what our academic bodies do, and
they do it the more effectually because they do it only subconsciously.
They think they are advancing healthy mental assimilation and
digestion, whereas in reality they are little better than cancer in the
stomach.
Let me return, however, to the Erewhonians. Nothing surprised me more
than to see the occasional flashes of common sense with which one
branch of study or another was lit up, while not a single ray fell upon
so many others. I was particularly struck with this on strolling into
the Art School of the University. Here I found that the course of study
was divided into two branches—the practical and the commercial—no
student being permitted to continue his studies in the actual practice
of the art he had taken up, unless he made equal progress in its
commercial history.
Thus those who were studying painting were examined at frequent
intervals in the prices which all the leading pictures of the last
fifty or a hundred years had realised, and in the fluctuations in their
values when (as often happened) they had been sold and resold three or
four times. The artist, they contend, is a dealer in pictures, and it
is as important for him to learn how to adapt his wares to the market,
and to know approximately what kind of a picture will fetch how much,
as it is for him to be able to paint the picture. This, I suppose, is
what the French mean by laying so much stress upon “values.”
As regards the city itself, the more I saw the more enchanted I became.
I dare not trust myself with any description of the exquisite beauty of
the different colleges, and their walks and gardens. Truly in these
things alone there must be a hallowing and refining influence which is
in itself half an education, and which no amount of error can wholly
spoil. I was introduced to many of the Professors, who showed me every
hospitality and kindness; nevertheless I could hardly avoid a sort of
suspicion that some of those whom I was taken to see had been so long
engrossed in their own study of hypothetics that they had become the
exact antitheses of the Athenians in the days of St. Paul; for whereas
the Athenians spent their lives in nothing save to see and to hear some
new thing, there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the
avoidance of every opinion with which they were not perfectly familiar,
and regarded their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which if an
opinion had once resorted, none other was to attack it.
I should warn the reader, however, that I was rarely sure what the men
whom I met while staying with Mr. Thims really meant; for there was no
getting anything out of them if they scented even a suspicion that they
might be what they call “giving themselves away.” As there is hardly
any subject on which this suspicion cannot arise, I found it difficult
to get definite opinions from any of them, except on such subjects as
the weather, eating and drinking, holiday excursions, or games of
skill.
If they cannot wriggle out of expressing an opinion of some sort, they
will commonly retail those of some one who has already written upon the
subject, and conclude by saying that though they quite admit that there
is an element of truth in what the writer has said, there are many
points on which they are unable to agree with him. Which these points
were, I invariably found myself unable to determine; indeed, it seemed
to be counted the perfection of scholarship and good breeding among
them not to have—much less to express—an opinion on any subject on
which it might prove later that they had been mistaken. The art of
sitting gracefully on a fence has never, I should think, been brought
to greater perfection than at the Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason.
Even when, wriggle as they may, they find themselves pinned down to
some expression of definite opinion, as often as not they will argue in
support of what they perfectly well know to be untrue. I repeatedly met
with reviews and articles even in their best journals, between the
lines of which I had little difficulty in detecting a sense exactly
contrary to the one ostensibly put forward. So well is this understood,
that a man must be a mere tyro in the arts of Erewhonian polite
society, unless he instinctively suspects a hidden “yea” in every “nay”
that meets him. Granted that it comes to much the same in the end, for
it does not matter whether “yea” is called “yea” or “nay,” so long as
it is understood which it is to be; but our own more direct way of
calling a spade a spade, rather than a rake, with the intention that
every one should understand it as a spade, seems more satisfactory. On
the other hand, the Erewhonian system lends itself better to the
suppression of that downrightness which it seems the express aim of
Erewhonian philosophy to discountenance.
However this may be, the fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease was
fatal to the intelligence of those infected by it, and almost every one
at the Colleges of Unreason had caught it to a greater or less degree.
After a few years atrophy of the opinions invariably supervened, and
the sufferer became stone dead to everything except the more
superficial aspects of those material objects with which he came most
in contact. The expression on the faces of these people was repellent;
they did not, however, seem particularly unhappy, for they none of them
had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead than alive.
No cure for this disgusting fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease has
yet been discovered.
* * *
It was during my stay in City of the Colleges of Unreason—a city whose
Erewhonian name is so cacophonous that I refrain from giving it—that I
learned the particulars of the revolution which had ended in the
destruction of so many of the mechanical inventions which were formerly
in common use.
Mr. Thims took me to the rooms of a gentleman who had a great
reputation for learning, but who was also, so Mr. Thims told me, rather
a dangerous person, inasmuch as he had attempted to introduce an adverb
into the hypothetical language. He had heard of my watch and been
exceedingly anxious to see me, for he was accounted the most learned
antiquary in Erewhon on the subject of mechanical lore. We fell to
talking upon the subject, and when I left he gave me a reprinted copy
of the work which brought the revolution about.
It had taken place some five hundred years before my arrival: people
had long become thoroughly used to the change, although at the time
that it was made the country was plunged into the deepest misery, and a
reaction which followed had very nearly proved successful. Civil war
raged for many years, and is said to have reduced the number of the
inhabitants by one-half. The parties were styled the machinists and the
anti-machinists, and in the end, as I have said already, the latter got
the victory, treating their opponents with such unparalleled severity
that they extirpated every trace of opposition.
The wonder was that they allowed any mechanical appliances to remain in
the kingdom, neither do I believe that they would have done so, had not
the Professors of Inconsistency and Evasion made a stand against the
carrying of the new principles to their legitimate conclusions. These
Professors, moreover, insisted that during the struggle the
anti-machinists should use every known improvement in the art of war,
and several new weapons, offensive and defensive, were invented, while
it was in progress. I was surprised at there remaining so many
mechanical specimens as are seen in the museums, and at students having
rediscovered their past uses so completely; for at the time of the
revolution the victors wrecked all the more complicated machines, and
burned all treatises on mechanics, and all engineers’ workshops—thus,
so they thought, cutting the mischief out root and branch, at an
incalculable cost of blood and treasure.
Certainly they had not spared their labour, but work of this
description can never be perfectly achieved, and when, some two hundred
years before my arrival, all passion upon the subject had cooled down,
and no one save a lunatic would have dreamed of reintroducing forbidden
inventions, the subject came to be regarded as a curious antiquarian
study, like that of some long-forgotten religious practices among
ourselves. Then came the careful search for whatever fragments could be
found, and for any machines that might have been hidden away, and also
numberless treatises were written, showing what the functions of each
rediscovered machine had been; all being done with no idea of using
such machinery again, but with the feelings of an English antiquarian
concerning Druidical monuments or flint arrow heads.
On my return to the metropolis, during the remaining weeks or rather
days of my sojourn in Erewhon I made a _resumé_ 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. Is it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels
dug out for consciousness, though we can detect no signs of them at
present?
“Again. Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the
term, having been once a new thing—a thing, as far as we can see,
subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a reproductive
system (which we see existing in plants without apparent
consciousness)—why may not there arise some new phase of mind which
shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of
animals is from that of vegetables?
“It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or
whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign
to man that his experience can give him no help towards conceiving its
nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and
consciousness which have been evolved already, it would be rash to say
that no others can be developed, and that animal life is the end of all
things. There was a time when fire was the end of all things: another
when rocks and water were so.”
The writer, after enlarging on the above for several pages, proceeded
to inquire whether traces of the approach of such a new phase of life
could be perceived at present; whether we could see any tenements
preparing which might in a remote futurity be adapted for it; whether,
in fact, the primordial cell of such a kind of life could be now
detected upon earth. In the course of his work he answered this
question in the affirmative and pointed to the higher machines.
“There is no security”—to quote his own words—“against the ultimate
development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines
possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much
consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines
have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the
animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised
machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five
minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake
of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million
years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May
not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they
not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud
and to forbid them further progress?
“But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of
consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can
draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with
everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite
variety of ways? The shell of a hen’s egg is made of a delicate white
ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is: the shell is a device
for holding the egg, as much as the egg-cup for holding the shell: both
are phases of the same function; the hen makes the shell in her inside,
but it is pure pottery. She makes her nest outside of herself for
convenience’ sake, but the nest is not more of a machine than the
egg-shell is. A ‘machine’ is only a ‘device.’”
Then returning to consciousness, and endeavouring to detect its
earliest manifestations, the writer continued:-
“There is a kind of plant that eats organic food with its flowers: when
a fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and hold it
fast till the plant has absorbed the insect into its system; but they
will close on nothing but what is good to eat; of a drop of rain or a
piece of stick they will take no notice. Curious! that so unconscious a
thing should have such a keen eye to its own interest. If this is
unconsciousness, where is the use of consciousness?
“Shall we say that the plant does not know what it is doing merely
because it has no eyes, or ears, or brains? If we say that it acts
mechanically, and mechanically only, shall we not be forced to admit
that sundry other and apparently very deliberate actions are also
mechanical? If it seems to us that the plant kills and eats a fly
mechanically, may it not seem to the plant that a man must kill and eat
a sheep mechanically?
“But it may be said that the plant is void of reason, because the
growth of a plant is an involuntary growth. Given earth, air, and due
temperature, the plant must grow: it is like a clock, which being once
wound up will go till it is stopped or run down: it is like the wind
blowing on the sails of a ship—the ship must go when the wind blows it.
But can a healthy boy help growing if he have good meat and drink and
clothing? can anything help going as long as it is wound up, or go on
after it is run down? Is there not a winding up process everywhere?
“Even a potato[5] in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him
which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he
wants and how to get it. He sees the light coming from the cellar
window and sends his shoots crawling straight thereto: they will crawl
along the floor and up the wall and out at the cellar window; if there
be a little earth anywhere on the journey he will find it and use it
for his own ends. What deliberation he may exercise in the matter of
his roots when he is planted in the earth is a thing unknown to us, but
we can imagine him saying, ‘I will have a tuber here and a tuber there,
and I will suck whatsoever advantage I can from all my surroundings.
This neighbour I will overshadow, and that I will undermine; and what I
can do shall be the limit of what I will do. He that is stronger and
better placed than I shall overcome me, and him that is weaker I will
overcome.’
“The potato says these things by doing them, which is the best of
languages. What is consciousness if this is not consciousness? We find
it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with
those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being
boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything
else, because we make so much about our own sufferings. Since, then,
they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them
emotionless; and so _quâ_ mankind they are; but mankind is not
everybody.
If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and mechanical
only, and that it is due to the chemical and mechanical effects of
light and heat, the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether
every sensation is not chemical and mechanical in its operation?
whether those things which we deem most purely spiritual are anything
but disturbances of equilibrium in an infinite series of levers,
beginning with those that are too small for microscopic detection, and
going up to the human arm and the appliances which it makes use of?
whether there be not a molecular action of thought, whence a dynamical
theory of the passions shall be deducible? Whether strictly speaking we
should not ask what kind of levers a man is made of rather than what is
his temperament? How are they balanced? How much of such and such will
it take to weigh them down so as to make him do so and so?”
The writer went on to say that he anticipated a time when it would be
possible, by examining a single hair with a powerful microscope, to
know whether its owner could be insulted with impunity. He then became
more and more obscure, so that I was obliged to give up all attempt at
translation; neither did I follow the drift of his argument. On coming
to the next part which I could construe, I found that he had changed
his ground.
“Either,” he proceeds, “a great deal of action that has been called
purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more
elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto (and in this
case germs of consciousness will be found in many actions of the higher
machines)—Or (assuming the theory of evolution but at the same time
denying the consciousness of vegetable and crystalline action) the race
of man has descended from things which had no consciousness at all. In
this case there is no _à priori_ improbability in the descent of
conscious (and more than conscious) machines from those which now
exist, except that which is suggested by the apparent absence of
anything like a reproductive system in the mechanical kingdom. This
absence however is only apparent, as I shall presently show.
“Do not let me be misunderstood as living in fear of any actually
existing machine; there is probably no known machine which is more than
a prototype of future mechanical life. The present machines are to the
future as the early Saurians to man. The largest of them will probably
greatly diminish in size. Some of the lowest vertebrate attained a much
greater bulk than has descended to their more highly organised living
representatives, and in like manner a diminution in the size of
machines has often attended their development and progress.
“Take the watch, for example; examine its beautiful structure; observe
the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it: yet this
little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks that
preceded it; it is no deterioration from them. A day may come when
clocks, which certainly at the present time are not diminishing in
bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in
which case they will become as extinct as ichthyosauri, while the
watch, whose tendency has for some years been to decrease in size
rather than the contrary, will remain the only existing type of an
extinct race.
“But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of the
existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which
they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.
No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement
forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked
while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to
destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present,
though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?
“As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of
man’s senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill
accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the
ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other.
Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the
caller. There was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable
that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound, even
through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then, that a day will
come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be
done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction?—when its
language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech
as intricate as our own?
“It is possible that by that time children will learn the differential
calculus—as they learn now to speak—from their mothers and nurses, or
that they may talk in the hypothetical language, and work rule of three
sums, as soon as they are born; but this is not probable; we cannot
calculate on any corresponding advance in man’s intellectual or
physical powers which shall be a set-off against the far greater
development which seems in store for the machines. Some people may say
that man’s moral influence will suffice to rule them; but I cannot
think it will ever be safe to repose much trust in the moral sense of
any machine.
“Again, might not the glory of the machines consist in their being
without this same boasted gift of language? ‘Silence,’ it has been said
by one writer, ‘is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our
fellow-creatures.’”