Page:Erewhon-1872-003.djvu/210

"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 man's eye is nearly as good as a living one's 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 eyes 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