 of technical terms has led
me doubtless into many errors, and I have occasionally, where I found
translation impossible, substituted purely English names and ideas for the
original Erewhonian ones, but the reader may rely on my general accuracy. I have
thought it best to insert my translation here.
 

                              Chapter Twenty-Three

                            The Book of the Machines

The writer commences: »There was a time when the earth was to all appearance
utterly destitute both of animal and vegetable life, and when according to the
opinion of our best philosophers it was simply a hot round ball with a crust
gradually cooling. Now if a human being had existed while the earth was in this
state and had been allowed to see it as though it were some other world with
which he had no concern, and if at the same time he were entirely ignorant of
all physical science, would he not have pronounced it impossible that creatures
possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming
cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have denied that it contained any
potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came. Is
it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug out for
consciousness, though we can detect no signs of them at present?
    Again. Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the term,
having been once a new thing - a thing, as far as we can see, subsequent even to
an individual centre of action and to a reproductive system (which we see
existing in plants without apparent consciousness) - why may not there arise
some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases
as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?
    It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or whatever it
may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign to man that his
experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature; but surely when
we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been
evolved already, it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and
that animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the
end of all things; another when rocks and water were so.«
    The writer, after enlarging on the above for several pages, proceeded to
inquire whether traces of the approach of such a new phase of life could be
perceived at present; whether we could see any tenements preparing which might
in a remote futurity be adapted for it; whether, in fact, the primordial cell of
such a kind of life
