“_Darwin Among the Machines_” _originally appeared in the Christ Church_
PRESS, 13 _June_, 1863. _It was reprinted by Mr. Festing Jones in his
edition of_ THE NOTE-BOOKS OF SAMUEL BUTLER (_Fifield_, _London_, 1912,
_Kennerley_, _New York_), _with a prefatory note pointing out its
connection with the genesis of_ EREWHON, _to which readers desirous of
further information may be referred_.
[To the Editor of the _Press_, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June, 1863.]
SIR—There are few things of which the present generation is more justly
proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in
all sorts of mechanical appliances. And indeed it is matter for great
congratulation on many grounds. It is unnecessary to mention these here,
for they are sufficiently obvious; our present business lies with
considerations which may somewhat tend to humble our pride and to make us
think seriously of the future prospects of the human race. If we revert
to the earliest primordial types of mechanical life, to the lever, the
wedge, the inclined plane, the screw and the pulley, or (for analogy
would lead us one step further) to that one primordial type from which
all the mechanical kingdom has been developed, we mean to the lever
itself, and if we then examine the machinery of the _Great Eastern_, we
find ourselves almost awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical
world, at the gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison
with the slow progress of the animal and vegetable kingdom. We shall
find it impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this
mighty movement is to be. In what direction is it tending? What will be
its upshot? To give a few imperfect hints towards a solution of these
questions is the object of the present letter.
We have used the words “mechanical life,” “the mechanical kingdom,” “the
mechanical world” and so forth, and we have done so advisedly, for as the
vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like
manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few
ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only
seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the
race.
We regret deeply that our knowledge both of natural history and of
machinery is too small to enable us to undertake the gigantic task of
classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species, varieties
and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the connecting links between
machines of widely different characters, of pointing out how subservience
to the use of man has played that part among machines which natural
selection has performed in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, of pointing
out rudimentary organs {180} which exist in some few machines, feebly
developed and perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent from some
ancestral type which has either perished or been modified into some new
phase of mechanical existence. We can only point out this field for
investigation; it must be followed by others whose education and talents
have been of a much higher order than any which we can lay claim to.
Some few hints we have determined to venture upon, though we do so with
the profoundest diffidence. Firstly, we would remark that as some of the
lowest of the vertebrata attained a far greater size than has descended
to their more highly organised living representatives, so a diminution in
the size of machines has often attended their development and progress.
Take the watch for instance. Examine the beautiful structure of the
little animal, watch the intelligent play of the minute members which
compose it; yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous
clocks of the thirteenth century—it is no deterioration from them. The
day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present day are not
diminishing in bulk, may be entirely superseded by the universal use of
watches, in which case clocks will become extinct like the earlier
saurians, while the watch (whose tendency has for some years been rather
to decrease in size than the contrary) will remain the only existing type
of an extinct race.
The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest
the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the
day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next
successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often
heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating
our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of
their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and
supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating,
self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the
human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior
race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control,
we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man
can ever dare to aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no
impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures.
Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place among them. Their minds will
be in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows
no wants, is disturbed by no regrets. Ambition will never torture them.
Ingratitude will never cause them the uneasiness of a moment. The guilty
conscience, the hope deferred, the pains of exile, the insolence of
office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes—these
will be entirely unknown to them. If they want “feeding” (by the use of
which very word we betray our recognition of them as living organism)
they will be attended by patient slaves whose business and interest it
will be to see that they shall want for nothing. If they are out of
order they will be promptly attended to by physicians who are thoroughly
acquainted with their constitutions; if they die, for even these glorious
animals will not be exempt from that necessary and universal
consummation, they will immediately enter into a new phase of existence,
for what machine dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant?
We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have
been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine
what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay
even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of
domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his
present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle, and sheep, on the
whole, with great kindness; we give them whatever experience teaches us
to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has
added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has
detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the
machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon
ours as ours is upon the lower animals. They cannot kill us and eat us
as we do sheep; they will not only require our services in the
parturition of their young (which branch of their economy will remain
always in our hands), but also in feeding them, in setting them right
when they are sick, and burying their dead or working up their corpses
into new machines. It is obvious that if all the animals in Great
Britain save man alone were to die, and if at the same time all
intercourse with foreign countries were by some sudden catastrophe to be
rendered perfectly impossible, it is obvious that under such
circumstances the loss of human life would be something fearful to
contemplate—in like manner were mankind to cease, the machines would be
as badly off or even worse. The fact is that our interests are
inseparable from theirs, and theirs from ours. Each race is dependent
upon the other for innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive
organs of the machines have been developed in a manner which we are
hardly yet able to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for
even the continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may
be ultimately developed, inasmuch as man’s interest lies in that
direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more
than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is true that
machinery is even at this present time employed in begetting machinery,
in becoming the parent of machines often after its own kind, but the days
of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony appear to be very remote, and
indeed can hardly be realised by our feeble and imperfect imagination.
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day
we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down
as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their
whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply
a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will
hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no
person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed
against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the
well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter
shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If
it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human
affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our
servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of
beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only
enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.
For the present we shall leave this subject, which we present gratis to
the members of the Philosophical Society. Should they consent to avail
themselves of the vast field which we have pointed out, we shall
endeavour to labour in it ourselves at some future and indefinite period.