nthus
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 repr