ne-tickling aphid?

"It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents
which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in
the streets of a city. When we look down from a high place upon crowded
thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood
travelling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town? No
mention shall be made of sewers, nor of the hidden nerves which serve to
communicate sensations from one part of the town's body to another; nor
of the yawning jaws of the railway stations, whereby the circulation is
carried directly into the heart,--which receive the venous lines, and
disgorge the arterial, with an eternal pulse of people. And the sleep of
the town, how life-like! with its change in the circulation."

Here the writer became again so hopelessly obscure that I was obliged to
miss several pages. He resumed:-

"It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well
and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the other
for our advantage, not their own; that man will be the ruling spirit and
the machine the servant; that as soon as a machine fails to discharge the
service which man expects from it, it is doomed to extinction; that the
machines stand to man simply in the relation of lower animals, the vapour-
engine itself being only a more economical kind of horse; so that instead
of being likely to be developed into a higher kind of life than man's,
they owe their very existence and progress to their power of ministering
to human wants, and must therefore both now and ever be man's inferiors.

"This is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible
approaches into the master; and we have come to such a pass that, even
now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines. If all
machines were to be annihilated at one moment, so that not a knife nor
lever nor rag of clothing nor anything whatsoever were left to man but
his bare body alone that he was born with, and if all knowledge of
mechanical laws were taken from him so that he could make no more
machines, and all machine-made food destroyed so that the race of man
should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become
extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger, but even
these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys. Man's very soul
is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: h