; but I cannot think it will ever be
safe to repose much trust in the moral sense of any machine.

"Again, might not the glory of the machines consist in their being
without this same boasted gift of language? 'Silence,' it has been said
by one writer, 'is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our
fellow-creatures.'"

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 living 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 identity, 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 unsuspected 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 Hypothetics at any of our Colleges of Unreason can compare
with some of these machines in their own line? In fact, wherever
precision is required man flies to the machine at once, as far preferable
to himself. Our sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our looms a stitch;
the machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary; it is
clear-headed and collected, when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no
slumber, when man must sleep or drop; ever at its post, ever ready for
work, its alacrity never flags, its patience never gives in; its might is
stronger than combined hundreds, and swifter than the flight of birds; it
can burrow beneath the earth, and walk upon the largest rivers and sink
not. This is the green tree; what then shall be done in the dry?

"Who shall say that a man does see or hear? He is such a hive and swarm
of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than
his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all.
May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An
affectionate machi