Themes

I know other bodies have minds like mine because their speech is new, fitting and cannot be explained by mechanical principles alone.

Proposes that an ape could be taught language by Amman's method for the deaf, after which it would be a little gentleman; speech is a trained bodily capacity, not proof of an immaterial soul.

Replaces 'Can machines think?' with the imitation game: a machine that converses indistinguishably from a human should be credited as we credit other people.

A machine could utter words but could never arrange them to answer the sense of whatever is said to it, as the dullest human can; this shows it lacks reason.

Edison's android Hadaly holds convincing conversations, but her speech plays from phonograph recordings written in advance by poets and philosophers, so her conversation shows other people's thought, not her own.

Torres argues that appropriate replies need not involve the automaton’s own reasoning: the constructor could prearrange them. The restored paragraph compares the practical difficulty with constructing a lifelike animal. This is a theoretical construction, not a report of a built conversational machine.

A machine that produces sonnets or answers is not thinking unless it writes them from felt thoughts and emotions and knows that it has done so.

Every game of skill can be played by an automaton, because a machine that can choose the right move from any position of the pieces can answer whatever its opponent does.

Torres rejects the mental/manual distinction and proposes automata whose actions are determined by circumstances under rules fixed at construction. Arbitrariamente means rules freely specified by the constructor, not random conduct. This passage does not establish learning beyond anticipated cases.

Machines governed by negative feedback correct their course toward a goal from information about their own errors, so purposeful behavior is not unique to organisms.

Turing distinguishes a trained machine from a computation whose internal state the operator aims to follow. The omitted continuation allows some prediction of its behaviour; opacity alone does not establish judgment. Brief extract: the full pp.458–459 discussion should be reviewed before making a sorting pool.

Machines act only from the disposition of their organs, which must be arranged for each particular action, while reason is a universal instrument usable in any circumstance.

Calculation is determinate and can be mechanized, but in chess no move follows necessarily from the last and the opponent's will interrupts any fixed sequence, so a pure machine could not play.

The engine cannot interpret a result that is not self-evident, such as a value becoming infinite; it can handle the case only if the programmer foresaw it and punched a card for it.

The primitive fact of consciousness is the feeling of willed effort meeting the body's resistance; in it we directly experience ourselves as a cause.

Much mental activity is automatic and physically caused, but the Will is an independent power that controls and directs that activity.

Consciousness is selective and grows more complex where the nervous system is least determinate, which would be useless if it had no effect; the automaton theory is an unwarranted a priori claim.

There is no necessary connection between my will to move my arm and its motion; I do not know how to move it, so God is the true cause and my will only the occasion.

Neural events form a closed causal chain; states of consciousness are always conditioned by them and never condition them.

Consciousness is a collateral product of the body's working, like a steam whistle, and has no power to modify it; humans are conscious automata.

Mind and body are strictly correlated and physical events have only physical causes, so feelings run alongside the nervous process without acting on it.

We feel the arm move when we will it, but the power by which will produces motion is unknown and inconceivable; we observe only constant conjunction.

The soul's faculties vary with the state of the brain, body, food and illness, so the whole person is a self-winding machine whose states follow from its organization.

Man is part of nature and every act of will is determined by motives that act on the brain, so free agency is an illusion.

There is no force without matter and no mind without brain; thought and will are functions of brain matter under natural law.

The struggle over free will has ended in favor of determinism; the human will is no freer than an animal's and differs only in degree.

Determinism treats conscious states as separate things in space; a free act comes from the whole self in real duration and cannot be predicted or explained by physical causes.

Quantum physics has withdrawn strict causality from the physical world, so physics no longer requires the complete determinism of mind that would rule out volition.

Under the mechanical view the brain's state at each moment is the necessary effect of the previous one, leaving no room for free will, yet the felt freedom of choice remains one of seven unsolved world-riddles.

Actions are caused by character and motives like any natural event, and this necessity is what makes praise and blame possible; an uncaused act would reflect nothing about the person.

Human actions follow from character and circumstances, but 'necessity' is a misleading word; a person who can shape his own character and resist his habits is morally free.

Moral accountability requires a real power to will or not will an action; if every act were necessitated, no one would be responsible.

A person's character is formed for him by circumstances, not by him, so it is unjust for society to punish the characters its own arrangements produce; crime should be prevented, not punished.

Positivist psychology refutes free will, so punishment cannot rest on moral guilt; a person is held responsible only because he lives in society, and penalties are social defense.

Conduct follows from heredity and environment like the rest of animal life, so the legal idea of free will and personal guilt is a 'gross error' and punishment should give way to treatment.

Satire of a country that tries and punishes people for illness and bodily failure, while treating forgery and violence as misfortunes of birth or upbringing needing cure.

Vital powers vary constantly in intensity while physical laws are fixed and uniform, so living bodies must be studied by different principles from inanimate ones.

Defends animism: the vital principle is the same as the thinking soul, against both mechanist physiology and Montpellier vitalism's separate vital force.

Neither mechanism nor finalism explains evolution; life is a vital impetus that physics and chemistry do not capture, though he criticizes the older vital-principle theories.

An embryo fragment can form a whole organism, which no machine could do, so development requires a non-physical ordering factor he calls entelechy.

Rejects a special vital force; living phenomena arise from the same kinds of forces as inorganic nature, arranged in complex ways.

Life phenomena, including development and instinct, can be explained by physics and chemistry, and experimental control of them removes the need for a vital principle.

Rejects vitalism because a vital force can do nothing except through physical and chemical forces, and rejects materialism because those conditions alone do not explain the ordering of vital phenomena.

The mechanistic theory cannot account for the way an organism maintains and reproduces its own structure, but vitalism is no better; biology needs the organism as its own basic concept.

Explains the living body's functions by the motion of matter alone, and states that explaining them requires explaining how the animal forms from its beginning by the same mechanical laws.

Proposes a developmental mechanics that studies the causes of embryonic form by experiment on eggs, treating development as the working-out of physical and chemical causes.

Argues from artificial parthenogenesis and tropism experiments that life processes, including the start of development of the egg, can be explained by physics and chemistry.

Argues against preformation that the embryo forms by epigenesis from unorganized matter, and attributes the forming to an essential force (vis essentialis) rather than to a pre-built mechanism.

Blumenbach denies pre-existing organized germs and defines formative nisus as a distinctive force of generation, growth, nutrition and reproduction.

Holds that an organized being is not a mere machine, because a machine has only motive power while an organism has a formative power that it passes to matter and that reproduces and repairs its own parts.

Argues from sea-urchin experiments, where a half-egg still yields a whole larva, that development cannot be the work of a machine and requires a non-mechanical agent he calls entelechy.

Criticizes the mechanistic theory of life, arguing that the self-maintaining and self-reproducing organization of the organism cannot be explained as the working of a machine.

Argues that reasoning is calculation and that a well-made language of signs would make every science as exact as algebra.

Jevons contrasts the incompleteness of the ancient syllogism with deduction founded on fundamental laws of thought that can be embodied in uniform mechanical movements.

Proposes a universal symbolic calculus so that disputants could settle a disagreement by sitting down and saying 'let us calculate'.

States the conviction that every definite mathematical problem can be settled, either by solution or proof of impossibility: 'in mathematics there is no ignorabimus'.

Distinguishes the geometrical mind, which reasons from explicit principles, from the intuitive mind (esprit de finesse), which grasps principles too many and subtle to state, and says the two cannot be reduced to each other.

Shows in dialogue that a party who accepts the premises can still refuse the conclusion, because each rule of inference added as a new premise demands another rule to apply it.

Poincaré argues that blind adherence to rules would require infallibility, whereas logicians have encountered contradictions and are revising their rules.

Proves that no general mechanical procedure can decide, for every statement of first-order logic, whether it follows from given axioms.

Says judges should be only the mouth that pronounces the words of the law, inanimate beings who cannot moderate its force or severity.

Holds that criminal judges must not interpret the law or consult its 'spirit', but apply it by a single syllogism, since interpretation opens the door to arbitrary judgment.

Allows equity to correct law's generality but holds that law without equity, though hard, is better than equity without law, which would make every judge a legislator.

Defines equity as the correction of law where it is defective because of its generality, and says the judge should decide as the legislator would have if present.

In the satire, the heaven of theoretical concepts is separated from the practitioners’ afterlife: practitioners could neither breathe nor see in the theorists’ world. This excerpt does not give a particular unjust judicial decision.

Argues that the code cannot supply every answer and that where it is silent the judge must use custom and 'free scientific research' rather than force the text.

Manifesto of the Free Law movement, arguing that judges already decide with more freedom than the statute allows and should do so openly.

Criticizes judges who deduce decisions mechanically from fixed conceptions regardless of results, and calls for law judged by how it works in practice.

Recommends that entry to the civil service be decided by open competitive examination instead of patronage.

Ranks men by reputation on a graded statistical scale of natural ability, using judges and statesmen as samples, and treats that ability as measurable and inherited.

Proposes selecting workers, including tram drivers and ship officers, by laboratory tests of the mental traits each job requires.

Terman anticipates occupational intelligence-quotient thresholds and recommends psychologists to screen applicants, while denying that available tests can unerringly select a precise occupation for each person.

Criticizes the examination system for selecting officials by a narrow written test, and proposes several alternative routes of recruitment such as recommendation and appointment.

Satirizes competitive examination for the civil service through the examiners Sir Gregory Hardlines and Mr Jobbles and a clerk who passes the test but proves dishonest.

Argues in six New Republic essays that the Army tests do not measure inborn intelligence and that the claim of an average mental age of fourteen is nonsense.

Binet argues that distraction, discomfort or boredom can cause failure on a test, making measurement of a child’s intelligence from very few tests absurd. This is a qualification of testing, not a rejection of all tests.

Argues that machines are evolving by the same process as organisms, with humans serving their reproduction, and will supplant humans.

Presents an Erewhonian treatise arguing that machines evolve and reproduce through human agency as clover reproduces through bees, followed by a reply that machines are only limbs.

Argues that artefacts such as firearms and boats change by many small successive variations, in a process analogous to Darwinian evolution.

Speculates in dialogue that machines may come to evolve self-supply, self-repair and reproduction and so succeed humans.

Treats machines as extra-corporeal limbs, so that it is humans who evolve by adding machines to themselves, not machines who evolve as a rival species.

Calls for a critical history of technology on the model of Darwin's history of natural organs, but says with Vico that human history differs from natural history because we made it.

Argues that tools and machines are unconscious projections of human organs, so that technology develops as an outward copy of the human body.

Distinguishes instinct, which makes organized instruments, from intelligence, which makes unorganized tools, placing machines outside the evolution of life.

Argues that the age of machinery has made men mechanical in head and heart as well as in hand.

The Erewhonian treatise argues that machines will become the masters and humans their servants, which is why Erewhon destroyed its machines.

Depicts a humanity that lives underground wholly dependent on and worshipping a Machine, which collapses and kills them.

Robots built to free humans from labour outnumber them, revolt and exterminate them.

Says that if shuttles wove by themselves, master workmen would need no assistants and masters no slaves, so self-working instruments would serve rather than rule.

Quotes Aristotle's self-weaving shuttles and calls the machine the redeemer of humanity that could free workers into leisure, if not for capitalist overwork.

Argues that machinery now competes with men but under proper conditions will serve them, and that the future depends on mechanical slavery.

Hopes that a practical science of nature will free people from countless diseases and perhaps from the infirmities of old age.

Speculates that mind will gain power over matter and that human life may be greatly prolonged once society is rationally ordered.

Asks whether the interval between birth and decay might have no assignable limit, and expects medicine and better living to lengthen life indefinitely.

Makes the defeat of death and the physical resurrection of all ancestors the common task to which science and technology should be directed.

Gulliver's wish for endless life collapses when he meets the Struldbruggs, immortals who keep ageing and become wretched.

Rejects Condorcet's indefinite prolongation of life, arguing that a partial improvement whose limit is unknown does not show that improvement is unlimited.

A singer who has lived over 300 years by an elixir finds such a long life empty, and the recipe is burned rather than used.

Metchnikoff defines orthobiosis as prolonged active, healthy old age followed by satiety of life and a wish for death, expressly distinguishing this ideal from simple prolongation.

Places personal identity in continuity of consciousness, not in the body, so a person who loses a limb, or whose consciousness follows a severed finger, remains the same self.

Reid argues that amputation does not divide the person: the enduring self is indivisible even though its thoughts, actions and feelings change.

A scientist's severed head is kept alive by machines and remains himself, thinking and suffering, without a body.

Proposes replacing the body organ by organ with mechanisms until the person is a brain in a cylinder linked to artificial senses, and treats this as the same mind continuing.

Aliens place a dead professor's preserved brain in a mechanical body and he continues as himself.

Argues that we ascribe identity to a ship or body whose parts are gradually replaced only because the change is gradual, and that this identity is a fiction of the imagination.

Satirizes a celebrated general who turns out to be assembled each morning from artificial limbs, eyes, palate and wig, leaving little that is him.

The Tin Woodman, whose flesh was replaced piece by piece with tin, meets his old living head, which denies that the tin man is the same person.

Machinery first displaces labour, but lower prices raise demand and soon reabsorb most or all of the displaced workers.

Ure reports seeing cheerful child workers in factories and claims that, with adequate food and clothing, they would thrive there better than in unhealthy homes. These are Ure’s claims, not independently established facts about factory conditions.

Labour is a means, not an end; any machine that saves an hour of work is progress, and suppressing machinery to create jobs is a sophism.

Sismondi locates the calamity in unjust distribution, not improved machinery. A self-employed worker could take the productivity gain as leisure, whereas a dependent worker may work longer for the same wage.

Added chapter concedes that the workers' belief that machinery often harms them is correct: it can cut the fund that employs labour while landlords and capitalists gain.

Doubts that all mechanical inventions so far have lightened the day's toil of any human being; they have let more people live the same life of drudgery and made fortunes for manufacturers.

It was expected that labour-saving inventions would lighten toil and end poverty; instead poverty deepens where machinery is most developed.

Machinery has impoverished India by destroying handicraft and has begun to desolate Europe; India should do without it.

Sismondi argues that greater output per unit of labor ought to increase enjoyment or rest; his self-employed worker stops after two hours, while the dependent worker does not receive the benefit.

Society's interest is the consumer's interest in abundance; labour saved by machines is freed for other wants, so the gain spreads through lower prices.

Expects labourers to associate as equals, collectively own the capital they work with, and elect their managers.

Machinery is not meant to lighten toil; it cheapens goods so the worker's share of the day shrinks and the unpaid share taken by the capitalist grows.

Improvements in production raise rent, so landowners capture the gain; the remedy is to tax land values.

As machines improve, workers work harder instead of resting; machine productivity should be taken as leisure by limiting work to three hours a day.

The nation owns the mills and machinery, and every citizen receives an equal credit on the annual product.

Machinery and all accumulated wealth are the work of past generations in common, so no one can claim them privately; all belongs to all.

Habit is unfree because it is natural, but free because the soul is no longer occupied by feelings it has made habitual and can attend to other things.

James recommends making useful actions habitual so that automatic performance of daily details releases higher mental powers for their own work.

The only habit a child should form is to have no habits, so that he keeps control of his liberty and strength.

Habit is a physical compulsion to go on as before; it takes the moral worth from good acts because it impairs freedom of mind, so as a rule all habit is objectionable.

Habit is not mere repetition but an acquired disposition that amounts to will; routine habit enslaves, intelligent habit is the means of action.

Obedience should reach the third degree, obedience of the understanding: the subject submits his own judgment to the superior's and accepts commands blindly.

Statutes and formulas, the mechanical instruments of reason, are the shackles of permanent immaturity; he criticizes 'do not argue, obey' while allowing obedience in office.

Standing armies and women's education both train blind obedience; strengthening the mind would end it.

Soldiers and officials serve the state as machines, with no free exercise of judgment or moral sense.

One who lets the world choose his plan of life needs only the ape-like faculty of imitation; the faculties of judgment are exercised only in making choices.

Military drill, by deception, blows and vodka, turns sensible young men into soldiers who would bayonet their own fathers on command.

Absolute obedience in childhood is necessary because it prepares the child to obey laws as a citizen; the youth later obeys rules of duty, which means obeying reason.

A child should not want to eat, sleep or do anything at fixed hours, so he keeps control of his own liberty.

Coketown's people all go in and out at the same hours to do the same work, and every day is the same as the one before.

If all acts were tabulated by rules like a table of logarithms, man would be a piano key; he will act against his interest to prove he is not.

The narrator praises the Tables of Hours that fix when everyone rises, works, eats and walks, and hopes to absorb even the two personal hours; the novel shows this as the end of freedom.

To reach moral perfection he adopted the virtue of Order and a written scheme assigning each hour of the day, which he credits with his improvement.

A daily programme gives mastery over one's time, but one must not be tied to it like a slave to a chariot.

The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser our senses; instruments like the theodolite let us neglect judging angles and distances ourselves.

Owning a watch and a nautical almanac, civilized man cannot tell the hour by the sun or name a star; each tool costs a native skill.

Logarithms spare calculators the tedium of long multiplications and divisions and the slippery errors they cause.

The machine does every arithmetic operation without effort and relieves the mind of the fatigue of reckoning with counters or pen.

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in calculation that could be given to anyone else if machines were used.

De Prony's tables were computed by workers who knew only addition and subtraction and were more accurate than skilled mathematicians; this shows calculation can be done by machinery.

Says people who once fed and sheltered themselves directly have become dependent on the tools and property they built, so that 'men have become the tools of their tools.'

The Erewhonian treatise argues men already live 'in a state of bondage to the machines' and would suffer terribly if machines vanished, since they can no longer live without them.

Kuno says the Machine has robbed people of spatial and tactile capacities, weakened relationships, paralyzed bodies and wills, and compelled worship. This is his speech, not the later narrated collapse.

Argues machinery has impoverished India by destroying hand industry and that Indians should reduce their use of mills and machines and return to hand-spinning and hand-weaving.

Argues that a machine which halves the time needed to make an article lets a self-supplying household enjoy the same comforts with less labour, and that displaced labour is soon reabsorbed.

Argues that under proper social arrangements machinery will do all necessary and unpleasant work, freeing people to cultivate themselves; at present it competes with men only because of private ownership.

Argues that the spread of industrial skill and intensive agriculture lets each nation and region produce its own food and manufactures instead of depending on distant specialised centres.

Victor, who never intended his creature to kill, judges himself 'not in deed, but in effect' the true murderer when his brother is killed and Justine condemned.

The narrator describes Holsten’s fear of his discovery’s consequences and his thought that publication might be premature. His later disclaimer of unforeseeable consequences is a separate passage.

In the final chapter, the old man whom Prokop recognizes as God urges him to abandon destructive work and start again with useful energy. This makes responsibility an obligation to redirect invention; it is not a legal rule about every unintended harm. Quoted from Lawrence Hyde’s 1925 English translation of the 1924 Czech novel.

Wiener responds to a request for wartime research on controlled missiles. He treats disclosure as a moral choice because of foreseeable civilian harm. This supports responsibility for dissemination, not unlimited liability for every unforeseeable use. Brief extract; review the full paragraph before preparing a sorting pool.

Argues science only lets the holders of power realise their purposes more fully; whether it does good or harm depends on those purposes, which at present are mostly evil.

Uses Daedalus, who caused the death of Minos yet was never punished, to argue that the scientific worker is not concerned with gods and that mankind must adjust its morality to the powers science gives it.

The scientists of Salomon's House consult on which of their inventions to publish and swear an oath to keep secret those they think fit, revealing some only to the state.

Signed 'Cellarius', the letter argues machines are evolving toward supremacy over man and that 'war to the death' should be proclaimed and every machine destroyed.

A gardener refuses a well-sweep that would water a hundred times more ground, saying that cunning implements produce cunning hearts unfit for the Tao.

The contracting powers agree to abstain from projectiles whose object is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.

Defends self-acting machinery against the charge that it harasses the poor, arguing that the blessings of mechanical science to society have been too little recognised.

Argues gas weapons such as tear gas are more humane than shells and bayonets, and that the Hague ban on gas projectiles was well meant but misguided.

Attacks the Cartesian view of animals as machines: a dog dissected alive has all the organs of feeling, and nature did not give it nerves in order that it should not feel.

Argues that what matters for moral standing is not whether a being can reason or talk but whether it can suffer.

The creature demands that his maker relieve his misery, arguing that he was benevolent until suffering made him a fiend.

Holds animals may be conscious automata; because they probably feel and an error could have terrible consequences, they should be treated as weaker brethren.

Argues that if men have rights so do the lower animals, and rejects doctrines that deny animals feel pain.

Argues animals are machines made by God whose actions follow from the disposition of their organs, and that they lack reason and a rational soul.

Dr Gall adds pain nerves to the Robots only so they will not damage themselves; asked if they will be happier, he says no, only more perfect technically, while Helena's Humanity League campaigns for them.

Calls a slave an animated instrument and property, and says that if tools could work of themselves, like the statues of Daedalus, masters would not need slaves.

Filmer treats patriarchal dominion as sovereign power, explicitly invoking life-and-death judgment, war and treaty making. The argument concerns paternal rule, not directly the manufacture of an intelligent being.

A fictional Edison builds an artificial woman, Hadaly, and gives her to Lord Ewald as a replacement for the woman he loves.

Argues a parent's dominion over a child does not derive from having begotten it but from the child's consent.

The creature tells Victor 'I ought to be thy Adam', and Victor recognises 'the duties of a creator towards his creature', framing the relation as obligation rather than ownership.

Argues men are God's property because they are his workmanship, but that human parents do not own children they beget, since children are the workmanship of their maker, the Almighty.

Robots are manufactured and sold by a company as products; the play ends with their revolt against their makers.

Calls the age mechanical in head and heart; men hope only in mechanism, and worship an idol of Strength instead of the Beautiful and Good.

Says 'faith in machinery' is England's besetting danger: freedom, coal, railroads, wealth and even religious organisations are treated as ends in themselves.

Says locomotives, machinery and telegraphs must be reduced to subjection to the real man instead of remaining objects of 'mere fetish-worship as now'.

At the 1900 Paris Exposition Adams feels the dynamos as a moral force, as early Christians felt the Cross, and finds himself inclined to pray to one.

People consult the Book of the Machine as scripture and come to worship the Machine that serves them.

Berdyaev describes faith in technics as the remaining strong faith of modern civilized humanity, whose attachment to it may change humanity’s own image.

Reply to Carlyle's 'Signs of the Times' defending mechanical invention as freeing people from drudgery for higher pursuits.

Says a country must have reached a high degree of civilization before it approaches the limit of economy in applying force to transport.

Judges Bacon's philosophy by its fruits: it has lengthened life, spanned rivers, annihilated distance and driven cars without horses; its law is progress.

Divides human history into savagery, barbarism and civilization, marking the stages largely by a sequence of inventions and discoveries.

Argues modern civilization, whose chief symbol is machinery, is an irreligious condition; true civilization is moral conduct, and India's ancestors chose not to pursue machinery.

Argues the West has turned society into a machine of commerce and politics whose aim is success, not goodness, eliminating moral responsibility.

Treats machine technology as the expression of Western man's will to power, a stage in a culture's life that ends in decline.

China should adopt Western mathematics, mechanics and arms while keeping Chinese ethical teaching as the foundation; the principle later summarized as Chinese learning for substance, Western learning for application.

China should keep the Confucian basis of society and take Western learning only to strengthen its material basis.

Germany borrowed English machine technology without the English institutions that grew up with it, which let a dynastic state use it; Veblen holds that the machine discipline will erode those older institutions over time.

Western technics has become detachable from the Faustian culture that made it, so non-Western peoples can take it up and turn it against the West.

Japan cannot take Western technical novelties while keeping its old spirit; it must adopt the spirit of civilization, the independence of the individual and the nation, that produced them.

Chinese and Western learning each have their own substance and application; combining Chinese substance with Western application makes both lose their meaning.

Machinery is the chief sign of modern civilization and has impoverished India; India cannot take it up and remain itself.

Japan can take Western science only if it assimilates it to its own character; if it copies Western nationalism it becomes a borrowed machine left with only borrowed weapons.

Ferry asserts that contemporary European nations generously discharge a superior race’s civilizing duty, contrasting this with earlier Spanish enslavement. The excerpt does not state the technological premise or the explicit right-because-duty formula.

The tropics must be administered by the higher civilizations as a trust, because their resources are needed by the world and their peoples cannot develop them alone.

Progress comes through struggle between races, and a scientifically efficient nation is justified in displacing less efficient peoples.

Satirical verse whose narrator rests European mastery in Africa on the Maxim gun alone: 'Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.'

Technically superior Martians treat humans as Europeans treated the Tasmanians, and the narrator asks whether people who exterminated the Tasmanians can complain.

Hobson rejects the claim that the struggle of races lets the 'socially efficient' justly govern or displace others, and traces imperialism to the interests of finance.

Colonizers' claims of roads, railways and material progress do not justify colonial rule; the Congo-Ocean railway cost lives, and no one knows what these countries would have built without Europe.

The state may be rebuilt on reason, but unlike a clock it cannot be stopped for repair; the living clockwork of the state must be repaired while it runs.

Lenin interprets Marx as requiring the working class to smash ready-made state machinery rather than merely take possession of it.

Hobbes criticizes private conscience as a competing judge of good and evil where civil law has determined the matter, arguing that competing private judgments would divide the commonwealth.

The state is not a machine or a factory but an organic union of all physical and spiritual needs grown through history, so it cannot be redesigned by contract.

The age trusts machinery in politics as in industry, believing good government is a matter of mechanical arrangements; Carlyle holds that social health depends on inward, dynamic forces that no constitution-making can supply.

Society is a growth and not a manufacture; constitutions are not made but grow, so treating the state as a contrivance to be redesigned mistakes its nature.

In the 'private' use of reason within an office, an officer, tax official or clergyman must obey and not argue; he may criticize freely only as a scholar addressing the public.

Civil servants are educated to a dispassionate, upright demeanor in which personal passions and ties give way to universal interests.

Administration should be a separate science carried out by trained officials under political direction, kept apart from politics.

The honor of the civil servant is to carry out a superior's order conscientiously as if it were his own conviction, even when he thinks it wrong; personal responsibility belongs to the political leader.

Most men serve the state 'not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies', as soldiers, jailers and constables, and so give up moral judgment; conscience must come first.

The state spreads each act of violence across many officials, each of whom says he only obeyed orders, so that no one feels responsible; every official must refuse.

Tools and machines are unconscious projections of the body's organs, with the hand as the model for all tools, so technology is the body carried outward.

Anything that takes part in the conscious movement of the body is added to the body schema; a woman's sense of location may extend to the feather in her hat.

The blind man's cane stops being an object in his hand and becomes an extension of his bodily reach; habit incorporates the tool into the body schema.

In handicraft the worker uses a tool; in the factory the machine uses the worker, who becomes its living appendage.

Instinct uses organized instruments that are part of the body, while intelligence makes inorganic tools that stay separate from it and can be varied without limit; this separateness defines homo faber.

An Erewhonian writer argues that machines are 'extra-corporeal limbs' and man a 'machinate mammal'; the Book's main author rejects this as a way of hiding the machines' growing independence.

Man is weak in himself but a tool-using animal: 'without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.'

People are strong by borrowing the might of the elements; steam, gravity and electricity do their work, so a person should 'hitch his wagon to a star'.

With his auxiliary organs man has become 'a kind of prosthetic God', but the organs have not grown onto him, give him trouble, and have not made him happy.

The savage's body is his only instrument and is stronger for it; had he an axe, a sling or a horse he would lose the strength and speed he now has.

'The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet'; each gain in equipment is a loss of the person's own strength and skill.

Thoreau contrasts a mobile, self-providing life with settled dependence and says that people have become the tools of their tools. The passage addresses dependence more directly than attribution of technical capability.

Edison argues that the android Hadaly, with recorded speech and no inner life of her own, will be better company for Ewald than the shallow woman she copies.

A machine might utter words in response to a touch, but it could never arrange words to answer the meaning of whatever is said to it, as even the dullest person can.

Satire in which Prince Oronaro prefers a doll stuffed with sentimental novels to the real queen; the play mocks a love that needs nothing back.

Nathanael feels only Olimpia understands him though she answers only 'Ah, ah'; the story treats this companionship as delusion.

The child's doll takes all the love given it and answers with silence, because it is made of stuff that cannot respond; Rilke treats this as the child's first experience of not being loved back.