This was the conclusion of the attack which led to the destruction of machinery throughout Erewhon.  There was only one serious attempt to answer it.  Its author said that machines were to be regarded as a part of man’s own physical nature, being really nothing but extra-corporeal limbs.  Man, he said, was a machinate mammal.  The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their own bodies, but many of man’s are loose, and lie about detached, now here and now there, in various parts of the world—­some being kept always handy for contingent use, and others being occasionally hundreds of miles away.  A machine is merely a supplementary limb; this is the be all and end all of machinery.  We do not use our own limbs other than as machines; and a leg is only a much better wooden leg than any one can manufacture.

“Observe a man digging with a spade; his right fore-arm has become artificially lengthened, and his hand has become a joint.  The handle of the spade is like the knob at the end of the humerus; the shaft is the additional bone, and the oblong iron plate is the new form of the hand which enables its possessor to disturb the earth in a way to which his original hand was unequal.  Having thus modified himself, not as other animals are modified, by circumstances over which they have had not even the appearance of control, but having, as it were, taken forethought and added a cubit to his stature, civilisation began to dawn upon the race, the social good offices, the genial companionship of friends, the art of unreason, and all those habits of mind which most elevate man above the lower animals, in the course of time ensued.

“Thus civilisation and mechanical progress advanced hand in hand, each developing and being developed by the other, the earliest accidental use of the stick having set the ball rolling, and the prospect of advantage keeping it in motion.  In fact, machines are to be regarded as the mode of development by which human organism is now especially advancing, every past invention being an addition to the resources of the human body.  Even community of limbs is thus rendered possible to those who have so much community of soul as to own money enough to pay a railway fare; for a train is only a seven-leagued foot that five hundred may own at once.”

The one serious danger which this writer apprehended was that the machines would so equalise men’s powers, and so lessen the severity of competition, that many persons of inferior physique would escape detection and transmit their inferiority to their descendants.  He feared that the removal of the present pressure might cause a degeneracy of the human race, and indeed that the whole body might become purely rudimentary, the man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism, an intelligent but passionless principle of mechanical action.