Page 258 - erewhon

course of time ensued.
‘Thus civilisation and mechanical progress advanced
hand in hand, each developing and being developed by the
other, the earliest accidental use of the stick having set the
ball rolling, and the prospect of advantage keeping it in mo-
tion. In fact, machines are to be regarded as the mode of
development by which human organism is now especially
advancing, every past invention being an addition to the
resources of the human body. Even community of limbs is
thus rendered possible to those who have so much commu-
nity of soul as to own money enough to pay a railway fare;
for a train is only a seven-leagued foot that five hundred
may own at once.’
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 noth-
ing but soul and mechanism, an intelligent but passionless
principle of mechanical action.
‘How greatly,’ he wrote, ‘do we not now live with our ex-
ternal 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