_The Impressions of Theophrastus Such_
by George Eliot
Chapter 17
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 beneficient qualities--my friend Trost 
always tries to keep up my spirits under the sight of the extrememely 
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 inimaginable; 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 premisses; 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 devises 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 
praise-worthy; '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 refelctive 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 fore him to conceive his own death.  
But I, from the point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine 
myself and my congeners 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 mineral 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 a 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, must 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 
premisses.'
	'Whose premisses?' 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.'

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Courtesy of Kim Stahl