Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Shadows of the Coming Race

My friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the universe

hitherto, but is confident that at some future period within the

duration of the solar system, ours will be the best of all possible

worlds--a hope which I always honour as a sign of beneficent

qualities--my friend Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under the

sight of the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many of

our fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance that

"all this will soon be done by machinery." But he sometimes neutralises

the consolation by extending it over so large an area of human labour,

and insisting so impressively on the quantity of energy which will thus

be set free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire an

occasional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the humbler

kinds of work should be entirely nullified while there are still left

some men and women who are not fit for the highest.

Especially, when one considers the perfunctory way in which some of the

most exalted tasks are already executed by those who are understood to

be educated for them, there rises a fearful vision of the human race

evolving machinery which will by-and-by throw itself fatally out of

work. When, in the Bank of England, I see a wondrously delicate machine

for testing sovereigns, a shrewd implacable little steel Rhadamanthus

that, once the coins are delivered up to it, lifts and balances each in

turn for the fraction of an instant, finds it wanting or sufficient, and

dismisses it to right or left with rigorous justice; when I am told of

micrometers and thermopiles and tasimeters which deal physically with

the invisible, the impalpable, and the unimaginable; of cunning wires

and wheels and pointing needles which will register your and my

quickness so as to exclude flattering opinion; of a machine for drawing

the right conclusion, which will doubtless by-and-by be improved into

an automaton for finding true premises; of a microphone which detects

the cadence of the fly's foot on the ceiling, and may be expected

presently to discriminate the noises of our various follies as they

soliloquise or converse in our brains--my mind seeming too small for

these things, I get a little out of it, like an unfortunate savage too

suddenly brought face to face with civilisation, and I exclaim--

"Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures

who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms,

giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with

infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a

slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?"

"But," says Trost, treating me with cautious mildness on hearing me vent

this raving notion, "you forget that these wonder-workers are the slaves

of our race, need our tendance and regulation, obey the mandates of our

consciousness, and are only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which we

decipher and make use of. They are simply extensions of the human

organism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably more powerful, ever more

subtle finger-tips, ever more mastery over the invisibly great and the

invisibly small. Each new machine needs a new appliance of human skill

to construct it, new devices to feed it with material, and often

keener-edged faculties to note its registrations or performances. How

then can machines supersede us?--they depend upon us. When we cease,

they cease."

"I am not so sure of that," said I, getting back into my mind, and

becoming rather wilful in consequence. "If, as I have heard you contend,

machines as they are more and more perfected will require less and less

of tendance, how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to

carry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply,

self-repair, and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty and subtle

work possible on this planet better than we could do it, but with the

immense advantage of banishing from the earth's atmosphere screaming

consciousnesses which, in our comparatively clumsy race, make an

intolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like

performance, looking on at all work only as it were to spring a rattle

here or blow a trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense of being

effective? I for my part cannot see any reason why a sufficiently

penetrating thinker, who can see his way through a thousand years or so,

should not conceive a parliament of machines, in which the manners were

excellent and the motions infallible in logic: one honourable

instrument, a remote descendant of the Voltaic family, might discharge a

powerful current (entirely without animosity) on an honourable

instrument opposite, of more upstart origin, but belonging to the

ancient edge-tool race which we already at Sheffield see paring thick

iron as if it were mellow cheese--by this unerringly directed discharge

operating on movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and by

necessary mechanical consequence on movements corresponding to what we

call the Funds, which with a vain analogy we sometimes speak of as

"sensitive." For every machine would be perfectly educated, that is to

say, would have the suitable molecular adjustments, which would act not

the less infallibly for being free from the fussy accompaniment of that

consciousness to which our prejudice gives a supreme governing rank,

when in truth it is an idle parasite on the grand sequence of things."

"Nothing of the sort!" returned Trost, getting angry, and judging it

kind to treat me with some severity; "what you have heard me say is,

that our race will and must act as a nervous centre to the utmost

development of mechanical processes: the subtly refined powers of

machines will react in producing more subtly refined thinking processes

which will occupy the minds set free from grosser labour. Say, for

example, that all the scavengers work of London were done, so far as

human attention is concerned, by the occasional pressure of a brass

button (as in the ringing of an electric bell), you will then have a

multitude of brains set free for the exquisite enjoyment of dealing with

the exact sequences and high speculations supplied and prompted by the

delicate machines which yield a response to the fixed stars, and give

readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the

production of epic poems or great judicial harangues. So far from

mankind being thrown out of work according to your notion," concluded

Trost, with a peculiar nasal note of scorn, "if it were not for your

incurable dilettanteism in science as in all other things--if you had

once understood the action of any delicate machine--you would perceive

that the sequences it carries throughout the realm of phenomena would

require many generations, perhaps aeons, of understandings considerably

stronger than yours, to exhaust the store of work it lays open."

"Precisely," said I, with a meekness which I felt was praiseworthy; "it

is the feebleness of my capacity, bringing me nearer than you to the

human average, that perhaps enables me to imagine certain results better

than you can. Doubtless the very fishes of our rivers, gullible as they

look, and slow as they are to be rightly convinced in another order of

facts, form fewer false expectations about each other than we should

form about them if we were in a position of somewhat fuller intercourse

with their species; for even as it is we have continually to be

surprised that they do not rise to our carefully selected bait. Take me

then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate

the justice of my ideas by my facial expression."

"Pooh!" says Trost (We are on very intimate terms.)

"Naturally," I persisted, "it is less easy to you than to me to imagine

our race transcended and superseded, since the more energy a being is

possessed of, the harder it must be for him to conceive his own death.

But I, from the point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine

myself and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things and giving

way not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of Entity. What I

would ask you is, to show me why, since each new invention casts a new

light along the pathway of discovery, and each new combination or

structure brings into play more conditions than its inventor foresaw,

there should not at length be a machine of such high mechanical and

chemical powers that it would find and assimilate the material to supply

its own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular

movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This

last stage having been reached, either by man's contrivance or as an

unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must

drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have

begun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy characters

in fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obliged

to supply them with work, found too much of everything done in too short

a time. What demons so potent as molecular movements, none the less

tremendously potent for not carrying the futile cargo of a consciousness

screeching irrelevantly, like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of

a swift horseman? Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will

have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the

time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a

few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become

pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold

around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the

ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been

overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely

more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less

energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle

in the sunlight Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments

happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined

itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted

existences do before the fittest--i.e., the existence composed of the

most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of

incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who--if our

consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling

of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection--who shall say

that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what

we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate

processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals

are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the

earth's crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be

blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate

and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of

what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without

sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute

rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy

the silence."

"Absurd!" grumbled Trost.

"The supposition is logical," said I. "It is well argued from the

premises."

"Whose premises?" cried Trost, turning on me with some fierceness. "You

don't mean to call them mine, I hope."

"Heaven forbid! They seem to be flying about in the air with other

germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies.

Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as

walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or

walking fast to catch the train."