human_soul.txt

human_soul.txt
Source:	phil_arc
Date:	1872 CE
Area:	C6

human_soul.txt is a text document stored in terminal C06 in C6.

Contents

[ARCHIVE: 1872CE-F553] [BUTLER, SAMUEL]

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: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine quâ non for his, as his for theirs.

Notes

• The text originates from Chapter 24 of the 1872 book Erewhon by English writer Samuel Butler, which itself originated from the article "Darwin among the Machines", published in 1863.