urity"--to quote his own words--"against the ultimate
development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines
possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much
consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines
have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the
animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised
machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five
minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake
of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million
years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not
the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in
the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to
forbid them further progress?

"But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness?
Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line?
Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is
not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? The
shell of a hen's egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as
much as an egg-cup is: the shell is a device for holding the egg, as much
as the egg-cup for holding the shell: both are phases of the same
function; the hen makes the shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery.
She makes her nest outside of herself for convenience' sake, but the nest
is not more of a machine than the egg-shell is. A 'machine' is only a
'device.'"

Then returning to consciousness, and endeavouring to detect its earliest
manifestations, the writer continued:-

"There is a kind of plant that eats organic food with its flowers: when a
fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and hold it fast
till the plant has absorbed the insect into its system; but they will
close on nothing but what is good to eat; of a drop of rain or a piece of
stick they will take no notice. Curious! that so unconscious a thing
should have such a keen eye to its own interest. If this is
unconsciousness, where is the use of consciousness?

"Shall we say that the plant does not know what it is doing merely
because it has no eyes, or ears, or brains? If we say that it acts
mechanically, and mechanically only, shall we not be forced to admit that
sundry other and apparently very deliberate actions are also mechanical?