man's moral influence will suffice to rule
them; 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 Twenty-Four

                      The Book of 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 clearheaded 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