rt 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 sec