Page 233 - erewhon

CHAPTER XXIV: THE

MACHINES—continued

But other questions come upon us. What is a man’s eye
‘but a machine for the little creature that sits behind in his
brain to look through? A dead eye is nearly as good as a liv-
ing one for some time after the man is dead. It is not the eye
that cannot see, but the restless one that cannot see through
it. Is it man’s eyes, or is it the big seeing-engine which has
revealed to us the existence of worlds beyond worlds into
infinity? What has made man familiar with the scenery
of the moon, the spots on the sun, or the geography of the
planets? He is at the mercy of the seeing-engine for these
things, and is powerless unless he tack it on to his own iden-
tity, and make it part and parcel of himself. Or, again, is
it the eye, or the little see-engine, which has shown us the
existence of infinitely minute organisms which swarm un-
suspected around us?
‘And take man’s vaunted power of calculation. Have we
not engines which can do all manner of sums more quickly
and correctly than we can? What prizeman in Hypothet-
ics at any of our Colleges of Unreason can compare with
some of these machines in their own line? In fact, wher-
ever precision is required man flies to the machine at once,
as far preferable to himself. Our sum-engines never drop a

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