Page 229 - erewhon

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. Nei-
ther 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 qua mankind they are; but man-
kind 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 chemi-
cal 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 de-
tection, and going up to the human arm and the appliances
which it makes use of? whether there be not a molecular ac-
tion 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

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