Sources

Passage 1 · English

And here I specially stayed to show that, were there such machines exactly resembling organs and outward form an ape or any other irrational animal, we could have no means of knowing that they were in any respect of a different nature from these animals; but if there were machines bearing the image of our bodies, and capable of imitating our actions as far as it is morally possible, there would still remain two most certain tests whereby to know that they were not therefore really men. Of these the first is that they could never use words or other signs arranged in such a manner as is competent to us in order to declare our thoughts to others: for we may easily conceive a machine to be so constructed that it emits vocables, and even that it emits some correspondent to the action upon it of external objects which cause a change in its organs; for example, if touched in a particular place it may demand what we wish to say to it; if in another it may cry out that it is hurt, and such like; but not that it should arrange them variously so as appositely to reply to what is said in its presence, as men of the lowest grade of intellect can do.

Passage 1 · English

Out of all which we may define, (that is to say determine,) what that is, which is meant by this word Reason, when wee reckon it amongst the Faculties of the mind. For Reason, in this sense, is nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Substracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the Marking and Signifying of our thoughts; I say Marking them, when we reckon by our selves; and Signifying, when we demonstrate, or approve our reckonings to other men.

Passage 1 · English

Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

Passage 1 · English

Arithmetical or algebraical calculations are, from their very nature, fixed and determinate. Certain ''data'' being given, certain results necessarily and inevitably follow. These results have dependence upon nothing, and are influenced by nothing but the ''data'' originally given. And the question to be solved proceeds, or should proceed, to its final determination, by a succession of unerring steps liable to no change, and subject to no modification. This being the case, we can without difficulty conceive the ''possibility'' of so arranging a piece of mechanism, that upon starting it in accordance with the ''data'' of the question to be solved, it should continue its movements regularly, progressively, and undeviatingly towards the required solution, since these movements, however complex, are never imagined to be otherwise than finite and determinate. But the case is widely different with the Chess-Player. With him there is no determinate progression. No one move in chess necessarily follows upon any one other. From no particular disposition of the men at one period of a game can we predicate their disposition at a different period. Let us place the ''first move'' in a game of chess, in juxta-position with the ''data'' of an algebraical question, and their great difference will be immediately perceived. From the latter — from the ''data'' — the second step of the question, dependent thereupon, inevitably follows. It is modeled by the ''data''. It must be ''thus'' and not otherwise. But from the first move in the game of chess no especial second move follows of necessity. In the algebraical question, as it proceeds towards solution, the ''certainty'' of its operations remains altogether unimpaired. The second step having been a consequence of the ''data'', the third step is equally a consequence of the second, the fourth of the third, the fifth of the fourth, and so on, ''and not possibly otherwise'', to the end. But in proportion to the progress made in a game of chess, is the ''uncertainty'' of each ensuing move. A few moves having been made, ''no'' step is certain. Different spectators of the game would advise different moves. All is then dependent upon the variable judgment of the players.

Passage 1 · English

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.

Passage 1 · English

This being the case with every nation, with every form of political life known to the world, it is manifest that the Democratic idea, in affirming the sovereignty of the people, or their responsibility to their own welfare alone, vacates every mode of national or political existence, by vacating the sacredness of the institutions on which such existence is based. In affirming the sovereignty of the people, the Democratic idea denies institutions any intrinsic or absolute sanctity, any sanctity save that which they derive from reflecting the popular well-being. It avouches the sole sacredness of humanity, and allows no sanctity to institutions underived from that source.

Passage 1 · English

The thing appears perfectly easy to superficial observers. If India (for example) is not fit to govern itself, all that seems to them required is that there should be a minister to govern it, and that this minister, like all other British ministers, should be responsible to the British Parliament. Unfortunately this, though the simplest mode of attempting to govern a dependency, is about the worst, and betrays in its advocates a total want of comprehension of the conditions of good government. To govern a country under responsibility to the people of that country, and to govern one country under responsibility to the people of another, are two very different things. What makes the excellence of the first is, that freedom is preferable to despotism: but the last _is_ despotism. The only choice the case admits is a choice of despotisms, and it is not certain that the despotism of twenty millions is necessarily better than that of a few or of one; but it is quite certain that the despotism of those who neither hear, nor see, nor know any thing about their subjects, has many chances of being worse than that of those who do.

Passage 1 · English

The class of phenomena to be considered under the title of Evolution, is in a great measure co-extensive with the class commonly indicated by the word Progress. But the word Progress is here inappropriate, for several reasons. To specify these reasons will perhaps be the best way of showing what is to be understood by Evolution.

Passage 1 · English

The mechanical means I employed to make these carriages bears some slight analogy to the operation of the faculty of memory. A toothed wheel had the ten digits marked upon its edge; between the nine and the zero a projecting tooth was placed. Whenever any wheel, in receiving addition, passed from nine to zero, the projecting tooth pushed over a certain lever. Thus, as soon as the nine seconds of time required for addition were ended, every carriage which had become due was indicated by the altered position of its lever. An arm now went round, which was so contrived that the act of replacing that lever caused the carriage which its position indicated to be made to the next figure above. But this figure might be a nine, in which case, in passing to zero, it would put over its lever, and so on. By placing the arms spirally round an axis, these successive carriages were accomplished. Multitudes of contrivances were designed, and almost endless drawings made, for the purpose of economizing the time and simplifying the mechanism of carriage. In that portion of the Difference Engine in the Exhibition of 1862 the time of carriage has been reduced to about one-fourth part of what was at first required. At last having exhausted, during years of labour, the principle of successive carriages, it occurred to me that it might be possible to teach mechanism to accomplish another mental process, namely—to foresee. This idea occurred to me in October, 1834. It cost me much thought, but the principle was arrived at in a short time. As soon as that was attained, the next step was to teach the mechanism which could foresee to act upon that foresight. This was not so difficult: certain mechanical means were soon devised which, although very far from simple, were yet sufficient to demonstrate the possibility of constructing such machinery. The process of simplifying this form of carriage occupied me, at intervals, during a long series of years. The demands of the Analytical Engine, for the mechanical execution of arithmetical operations, were of the most extensive kind. The multitude of similar parts required by the Analytical Engine, amounting in some instances to upwards of fifty thousand, rendered any, even the simplest, improvement of each part a matter of the highest importance, more especially as regarded the diminished amount of expenditure for its construction.

Passage 1 · English

What the creature is in-himself or essentially, must become phenomenally organized to his own experience, in order to his having any consciousness, or before he can claim that projection from his creator which makes existence or anything else predicable of him. And finite existence, existence in time and space, alone expresses what the creature is in-himself or essentially, namely: a form of universal destitution and hence of dependence upon what is not him^ self

Passage 1 · English translation

At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity. The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery.

Passage 1 · English

The equality of married persons before the law, is not only the sole mode in which that particular relation can be made consistent with justice to both sides, and conducive to the happiness of both, but it is the only means of rendering the daily life of mankind, in any high sense, a school of moral cultivation. Though the truth may not be felt or generally acknowledged for generations to come, the only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals. The moral education of mankind has hitherto emanated chiefly from the law of force, and is adapted almost solely to the relations which force creates. In the less advanced states of society, people hardly recognise any relation with their equals. To be an equal is to be an enemy. Society, from its highest place to its lowest, is one long chain, or rather ladder, where every individual is either above or below his nearest neighbour, and wherever he does not command he must obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are mainly fitted to a relation of command and obedience. Yet command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state.

Passage 1 · English

Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. They are also capable of some inherited improvement, as we see in the domestic dog compared with the wolf or jackal. If it could be proved that certain high mental powers, such as the formation of general concepts, self-consciousness, etc., were absolutely peculiar to man, which seems extremely doubtful, it is not improbable that these qualities are merely the incidental results of other highly-advanced intellectual faculties; and these again mainly the result of the continued use of a perfect language. At what age does the new-born infant possess the power of abstraction, or become self-conscious, and reflect on its own existence? We cannot answer; nor can we answer in regard to the ascending organic scale. The half-art, half-instinct of language still bears the stamp of its gradual evolution.

Passage 1 · English

“We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualise it; we look at our own limbs, and know that the combination forms an individual which springs from a single centre of reproductive action; we therefore assume that there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a single centre; but this assumption is unscientific, and the bare fact that no vapour-engine was ever made entirely by another, or two others, of its own kind, is not sufficient to warrant us in saying that vapour-engines have no reproductive system. The truth is that each part of every vapour-engine is bred by its own special breeders, whose function it is to breed that part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system, which is at present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety.”

Passage 1 · English

It may be assumed, then, that molecular changes in the brain are the causes of all the states of consciousness of brutes. Is there any evidence that these states of consciousness may, conversely, cause those molecular changes which give rise to muscular motion? I see no such evidence. The frog walks, hops, swims, and goes through his gymnastic performances quite as well without consciousness, and consequently without volition, as with it; and, if a frog, in his natural state, possesses anything corresponding with what we call volition, there is no reason to think that it is anything but a concomitant of the molecular changes in the brain which form part of the series involved in the production of motion. The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes.

Passage 1 · English

Although the Logical Abacus considerably reduced the labour of using the Indirect Method, it was not free from the possibility of error. I thought moreover that it would afford a conspicuous proof of the generality and power of the method if I could reduce it to a purely mechanical form. … It seemed strange that in the more intricate science of quantity mechanism could be applicable, whereas in the simple science of qualitative reasoning, the syllogism was only by analogy or simile called an Instrument. … [Smee's designs] do not attempt the performance of logical inference.

Passage 1 · English

That these eddies are stirred by causes that have no connection with either dominant interests or present impressions seems manifest from the phenomena of dreaming. The chaotic imagery there appears due to the unequal stimulus of nutrition in different localities. But if an accidental variation in nutrition is sufficient to determine the brain's action, what safeguard have we at any time against its random influence? It may of course be reasonably objected that the exceptional state of sleep can afford no proper clue to the brain's operations when awake. But Maury in his classic work, Le Sommeil, has conclusively proved the passage of dreams through "hypnagogic hallucinations" into that meteoric shower of images and suggestions, irrelevant to the main line of thought, the continual presence of which every one who has once had his interest awakened in the subject, will without difficulty recognise in himself. Ordinarily these perish in being born, but if one by chance saunters into the mind, which is related to the dominant pursuit of the moment, presto! it is pounced upon and becomes part of the empirical Ego. The greatest inventions, the most brilliant thoughts often turn up thus accidentally, but may mould for all that the future of the man. Would they have gained this prominence above their peers without the watchful eye of consciousness to recognise their value and emphasise them into permanence?

Passage 1 · Spanish

¿Qué es el cerebro, sino una gran máquina, cuyos exquisitos resortes se mueven en virtud de impulsos mil y mil veces transformados? ¿Qué es el alma, sino el conjunto de esas funciones mecánicas? La acción físico-química del estímulo sanguíneo, la transmisión nerviosa, la idea, en su carácter imponderable e intangible, no son sino estados diversos de una misma materia.

Passage 1 · English

The effect of inventions and improvements in the productive arts is to save labor—that is, to enable the same result to be secured with less labor, or a greater result with the same labor. … [W]hile the primary effect of labor-saving improvements is to increase the power of labor, the secondary effect is to extend cultivation, and, where this lowers the margin of cultivation, to increase rent. Thus, where land is entirely appropriated … the ultimate effect of labor-saving machinery or improvements is to increase rent without increasing wages or interest. … [T]his … explains the otherwise perplexing fact that labor-saving machinery everywhere fails to benefit laborers.

Passage 1 · English

Our race-destiny is thoroughly incapable, I am happy to say, of furnishing a destiny for the individual man. We are not the race, but individuals embraced in it; and though there is beyond doubt a race-destiny for man, there is no such thing as an individual destiny. Human individuality is constituted by freedom and rationality; and if therefore a certain destiny were imposed upon it to fulfil, either by deity or demon, it would immediately collapse. ... the individual man, because he is by creation free and rational, is ipso facto the arbiter of his own spiritual life and character.

Passage 1 · English

It is but a very small part of the entire process, which goes to form a piece of reasoning, which they are capable of performing. For, if we begin from the beginning, that process would involve four tolerably distinct steps. There is, first, the statement of our data in accurate logical language. This step deserves to be reckoned, since the variations of popular language are so multitudinous, and often so vague and ambiguous, that they may need careful consideration before they can be reduced to form. Then, secondly, we have to throw these statements into a form fit for the engine to work with — in this case the reduction of each proposition to its elementary denials. [...] Thirdly, there is the combination or further treatment of our premises after such reduction. Finally, the results have to be interpreted or read off. This last generally gives rise to much opening for skill and sagacity; [...] it then becomes a question of judgment which of these is the simplest and best. [...] I cannot see that any machine can hope to help us except in the third of these steps; so that it seems very doubtful whether any thing of this sort really deserves the name of a logical engine.

Passage 1 · English

As things are now, between the waste of labour-power in mere idleness and its waste in unproductive work, it is clear that the world of civilization is supported by a small part of its people; when all were working usefully for its support, the share of work which each would have to do would be but small, if our standard of life were about on the footing of what well-to-do and refined people now think desirable. We shall have labour-power to spare, and shall, in short, be as wealthy as we please. It will be easy to live. If we were to wake up some morning now, under our present system, and find it "easy to live," that system would force us to set to work at once and make it hard to live; we should call that "developing our resources," or some such fine name. The multiplication of labour has become a necessity for us, and as long as that goes on no ingenuity in the invention of machines will be of any real use to us. Each new machine will cause a certain amount of misery among the workers whose special industry it may disturb; so many of them will be reduced from skilled to unskilled workmen, and then gradually matters will slip into their due grooves, and all will work apparently smoothly again;

Passage 1 · English

The organs themselves, and all the rest of the physical world, will, however, all the time be quite indifferent to this consequence, and would quite as cheerfully, the circumstances changed, compass the animal’s destruction. In a word, survival can enter into a purely physiological discussion only as an hypothesis made by an onlooker, about the future. But the moment you bring a consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer is it, ‘if survival is to occur, then so and so must brain and other organs work.’ It has now become an imperative decree: ‘Survival shall occur, and therefore organs must so work!’ Real ends appear for the first time now upon the world’s stage. The conception of consciousness as a purely cognitive form of being, which is the pet way of regarding it in many idealistic schools, modern as well as ancient, is thoroughly anti-psychological, as the remainder of this book will show. Every actually existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence, would not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition are mainly subservient to these ends, discerning which facts further them and which do not. Now let consciousness only be what it seems to itself, and it will help an instable brain to compass its proper ends. The movements of the brain per se yield the means of attaining these ends mechanically, but only out of a lot of other ends, if so they may be called, which are not the proper ones of the animal, but often quite opposed. The brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of no certainties. But the consciousness, with its own ends present to it, and knowing also well which possibilities lead thereto and which away, will, if endowed with causal efficacy, reinforce the favorable possibilities and repress the unfavorable or indifferent ones. The nerve-currents, coursing through the cells and fibres, must in this case be supposed strengthened by the fact of their awaking one consciousness and dampened by awaking another. How such reaction of the consciousness upon the currents may occur must remain at present unsolved: it is enough for my purpose to have shown that it may not uselessly exist, and that the matter is less simple than the brain-automatists hold.

Passage 1 · English

And yet our consciousness is there, and has in all probability been evolved, like all other functions, for a use — it is to the highest degree improbable a priori that it should have no use. Its use seems to be that of selection; but to select, it must be efficacious. States of consciousness which feel right are held fast to; those which feel wrong are checked. If the ‘holding’ and the ‘checking’ of the conscious states severally mean also the efficacious reinforcing or inhibiting of the correlated neural processes, then it would seem as if the presence of the states of mind might help to steer the nervous system and keep it in the path which to the consciousness seemed best. Now on the average what seems best to consciousness is really best for the creature.

Passage 1 · French

M. Inaudi, qui présente un développement exceptionnel d'une seule espèce de mémoire, la mémoire des chiffres. C'est ce dont on s'aperçoit facilement lorsqu'on compare chez lui deux choses presque identiques, la mémoire des chiffres et la mémoire des lettres. [...] Sa mémoire des chiffres — que nous allons examiner tout à l'heure méthodiquement — est près de cent fois supérieure à la moyenne ; sa mémoire des lettres est faible : il est incapable de répéter plus de cinq à six lettres ; même impuissance pour répéter deux lignes de prose ou de vers. [...] Il n'y a qu'un seul cas où il se rappelle exactement une suite de mots : c'est quand ces mots font partie de l'énoncé d'un problème. Ceci est intéressant et montre combien l'attention et l'exercice sont des facteurs importants dans la formation des mémoires partielles ; cette formation ne repose probablement pas, selon nous, sur un fait anatomique, mais bien sur un fait psychologique; nous entendons par là que ce qui produit le développement d'une mémoire, c'est — outre une condition physiologique inconnue — un ensemble de facultés mentales, l'attention, la volonté, la persévérance et par-dessus tout un goût passionné pour le genre d'études qui est en connexion avec cette mémoire. Lorsqu'on parcourt les études biographiques qui ont été publiées jusqu'à ce jour sur les calculateurs prodiges, on s'aperçoit que les auteurs n'ont point fait cette distinction importante entre la mémoire et le calcul; surtout ils n'ont pas cherché à prendre une mesure de la mémoire.

Passage 1 · English translation

In its ordinary sense the word "crowd" means a gathering of individuals of whatever nationality, profession, or sex, and whatever be the chances that have brought them together. From the psychological point of view the expression "crowd" assumes quite a different signification. Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organised crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the LAW OF THE MENTAL UNITY OF CROWDS.

Passage 1 · English

So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless.

Passage 1 · Italian

Abbiamo poi la più alta gerarchia fra i medici, quella degli Igei, che studiano gli organismi sani, per spiare prima dello sviluppo della malattia la disposizione ad ammalare; e sono essi che visitano i neonati per verificare se sono atti alla vita. Anche fra essi si è formata una sottospecialità, che è quella dei Psicoigei, che come vedremo fra poco, constatano nel neonato le future attitudini al delitto, onde sopprimere i delinquenti, prima ch’essi possano recar danno alla società in cui son nati.

Passage 1 · English

Now, all this is a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has been entirely smothered. Freedom in all these senses presents simply no problem at all. No matter what the soft determinist mean by it,--whether he mean the acting without external constraint; whether he mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law of the whole,--who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and sometimes we are not? But there _is_ a problem, an issue of fact and not of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is often decided without discussion in one sentence,--nay, in one clause of a sentence,--by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their efforts to show {150} what 'true' freedom is; and that is the question of determinism, about which we are to talk to-night. Fortunately, no ambiguities hang about this word or about its opposite, indeterminism. Both designate an outward way in which things may happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance. Now, evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism and indeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible to find. Let us look at the difference between them and see for ourselves.

Passage 1 · Romanian

Fiecare e stăpîn pe persoana sa, fiecare face ceea ce voieşte. Legi nu există. Această omenire a înţeles adevărul scop al vieţii. Aruncaţi pe un glob din spaţiul nemărginit, la ce bun ar fi fost a se dezbina, a-.şi alege fiecare trib un stăpîn a cărui progenitură incapabilă sau capabilă să aibă drepturi asupra tuturor celorlalţi?

Passage 1 · English

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality. The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius.

Passage 1 · English

The parallel is the more striking since it has long been known with regard to animal tissues that the same drug, administered in large or small doses, might have opposite effects, and in preceding chapters we have seen that the same statement holds good of plants and metals also. #Stimulus of light.#--Even the responses of such a highly specialised organ as the retina are strictly paralleled by inorganic responses. We have seen how the stimulus of light evokes in the artificial retina responses which coincide in all their detail with those produced in the real retina. This was seen in ineffective stimuli becoming effective after repetition, in the relation between stimulus and response, and in the effects produced by temperature; also in the phenomenon of after-oscillation. These similarities went even further, the very abnormalities of retinal response finding their reflection in the inorganic.

Passage 1 · English

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Passage 1 · English

Our good Queen liked science very much. She circulated an order that all the women in her country should be educated. Accordingly a number of girls' schools were founded and supported by the government. Education was spread far and wide among women. And early marriage also was stopped. No woman was to be allowed to marry before she was twenty-one. I must tell you that, before this change we had been kept in strict purdah. While the women were engaged in scientific research, the men of this country were busy increasing their military power. When they came to know that the female universities were able to draw water from the atmosphere and collect heat from the sun, they only laughed at the members of the universities and called the whole thing "a sentimental nightmare"! Then the Lady Principal with her two thousand students marched to the battle field, and arriving there directed all the rays of the concentrated sunlight and heat towards the enemy. The heat and light were too much for them to bear. They all ran away panic-stricken, not knowing in their bewilderment how to counteract that scorching heat. When they fled away leaving their guns and other ammunitions of war, they were burnt down by means of the same sun-heat.

Passage 1 · Russian

Главный город Республики, получивший название Звёздного, был расположен на самом полюсе. [...] Окон в стенах не было, так как здания освещались изнутри электричеством. Электричеством же освещались и улицы. Ввиду суровости климата над городом была устроена непроницаемая для света крыша, с могучими вентиляторами для постоянного обмена воздуха. [...] Подвесные электрические дороги соединяли между собой населённые места республики, перекидывая ежедневно из одного города в другой десятки тысяч людей и миллионы килограммов товара. Однако, эта демократическая внешность прикрывала чисто самодержавную тиранию членов-учредителей бывшего треста. Предоставляя другим места депутатов в Палате, они неизменно проводили своих кандидатов в директора заводов. В руках Совета этих директоров сосредоточивалась экономическая жизнь страны. Они принимали все заказы и распределяли их по заводам; они приобретали материалы и машины для работы; они вели всё хозяйство заводов.

Passage 1 · English

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? — fated or free? — material or spiritual? — here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right. A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word [pi rho alpha gamma mu alpha], meaning action, from which our words ‘practice’ and ‘practical’ come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear,’ in the ‘Popular Science Monthly’ for January of that year [Footnote: Translated in the Revue Philosop hique for January, 1879 (vol. vii).] Mr. Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that to develope a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve — what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.

Passage 1 · English

Many years later I was so harassed with the old question of Determinism, which would leave every human action under the control of Heredity and Environment, that I made a series of observations on the actions of my own mind in relation to Free Will. I employ the word not merely as meaning ‘unhindered’ but in the special sense of an uncaused and creative action. It was carried on almost continuously for six weeks, and off and on for many subsequent months[55]. The procedure was this. Whenever I caught myself in an act of what seemed to be ‘Free Will’ in the above sense, I checked myself and tried hard to recollect what had happened before, made rapid notes, and then wrote a full account of the case. To my surprise, I found, after some days’ work, that the occasions were rare on which there seemed room for the exercise of Free Will as defined above. I subsequently reckoned that they did not occur oftener than once a day. Motives for all the other events could be traced backwards in succession, by orderly and continuous steps, until they led into a tangle of familiar paths. It was curious to watch the increase of power given by practice, of recalling mental actions which being usually overlooked give the false idea that much has been performed through a creative act, or by inspiration, which is really due to straightforward causation. The subject is too complex to be more fully gone into here; I must refer to the Memoir itself. The general result of the inquiry was to support the views of those who hold that man is little more than a conscious machine, the slave of heredity and environment, the larger part, perhaps all, of whose actions are therefore predictable. As regards such residuum as may not be automatic but creative, and which a Being, however wise and well-informed, could not possibly foresee, I have nothing to say, but I found that the more carefully I inquired, whether it was into hereditary similarities of conduct, into the life-histories of twins, or introspectively into the actions of my own mind, the smaller seemed the room left for this possible residuum.

Passage 1 · English

The essential fact of the politics of the age in which Bert Smallways lived--the age that blundered at last into the catastrophe of the War in the Air--was a very simple one, if only people had had the intelligence to be simple about it. The development of Science had altered the scale of human affairs. By means of rapid mechanical traction, it had brought men nearer together, so much nearer socially, economically, physically, that the old separations into nations and kingdoms were no longer possible, a newer, wider synthesis was not only needed, but imperatively demanded. Just as the once independent dukedoms of France had to fuse into a nation, so now the nations had to adapt themselves to a wider coalescence, they had to keep what was precious and possible, and concede what was obsolete and dangerous. A saner world would have perceived this patent need for a reasonable synthesis, would have discussed it temperately, achieved and gone on to organise the great civilisation that was manifestly possible to mankind. The world of Bert Smallways did nothing of the sort. Its national governments, its national interests, would not hear of anything so obvious; they were too suspicious of each other, too wanting in generous imaginations. They began to behave like ill-bred people in a crowded public car, to squeeze against one another, elbow, thrust, dispute and quarrel. Vain to point out to them that they had only to rearrange themselves to be comfortable. Everywhere, all over the world, the historian of the early twentieth century finds the same thing, the flow and rearrangement of human affairs inextricably entangled by the old areas, the old prejudices and a sort of heated irascible stupidity, and everywhere congested nations in inconvenient areas, slopping population and produce into each other, annoying each other with tariffs, and every possible commercial vexation, and threatening each other with navies and armies that grew every year more portentous.

Passage 1 · Chinese

寶玉道：「既是中國的船，為甚要用外國人駛？」包妥當道：「中國人不會駛呢。」寶玉搖頭道：「沒有的話！外國人也不多兩個眼睛，也不多兩條膀子，有什麼不會的？不斈罷了。」包妥當道：「只怕心眼兒不及他呢。」寶玉道：「但凡是個人，心眼兒總是一樣的。不過有一種人被一種嗜好迷住，不得開罷了。還有孔子說的：『人一能之，己百之；人十能之，己千之。』那裡有斈不會的斈問呢？咱們不趕早斈會了，萬一他們各咱們不對起來，撒手不乾了，那就怎麼好呢？這麼大的船，不成了廢物了麼？」

Passage 1 · Spanish

—Tardaríamos mil años. Fíjese en el proceso de afinación de nuestro cerebro; tiene millones de años, toda la edad de la humanidad. Nuestro hombre se encontraría, en cuanto a la inteligencia —o percepción, como se la llame—, en el mismo estado que un recién nacido. —Todo esto es perfectamente cierto; y mientras usted hablaba, iba yo haciendo iguales consideraciones. Pero, por lógico que sea su razonamiento, no es más que una conjetura. Creo que ésta es justamente la falla de su razonamiento: estamos juzgando como seres creados y no como creadores. ¿Quién puede decir qué facultades tendrá un sistema nervioso hecho en todos sus elementos con idéntica constitución a la de un hombre en plena edad viril?

Passage 1 · Polish

Te miliony maszyn, ludziom służące, wymaga ą z swe strony do obsługi całe rzeszy robotników czu nych, umie ętnych, metalowe , nielitościwe dziwostworze po prostu za- +przedanych i niemyślących o niczym więce , ak że w dane chwili trzeba pewien guzik +pocisnąć lub dźwignię przerzucić. Pracu ą względnie krótko, płatni są dobrze, ale umysł +ich, zaostrza ąc się w ednym kierunku, tępie e dziwnie we wszystkich innych, robiąc ich +z wolna obo ętnymi na to, co się dzie e poza fabryką, warsztatem i kołem ich na bliższe +rodziny.

Passage 1 · English

Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workman, as a result of his personal experience, must of necessity under the new system be done by the management in accordance with the laws of the science; because even if the workman was well suited to the development and use of scientific data, it would be physically impossible for him to work at his machine and at a desk at the same time. It is also clear that in most cases one type of man is needed to plan ahead and an entirely different type to execute the work. The man in the planning room, whose specialty under scientific management is planning ahead, invariably finds that the work can be done better and more economically by a subdivision of the labor; each act of each mechanic, for example, should be preceded by various preparatory acts done by other men. And all of this involves, as we have said, "an almost equal division of the responsibility and the work between the management and the workman."

Passage 1 · Spanish

Renuncio a describirte la ciudad. No podemos ni soñar todo lo que de magnificencia, de suntuosidad, de comodidad y de higiene estaba allí acumulado. Por cierto que no me daba cuenta para qué todo aquel aparato de higiene, pues no se veía ser vivo alguno. Ni hombres, ni animales. Ni un perro cruzaba la calle; ni una golondrina, el cielo.

Passage 1 · English

In the light of this more adequate hypothesis the parts and activities which we discern in a living organism and its biological environment can be understood only as manifestations of a whole which is the life of the organism, and which expresses itself in activity. The parts and their spatial arrangements, including environment, are the expression of active and unceasing maintenance, nutrition, or metabolism; and the activities are activities which express themselves in this maintenance. Reproduction is only a phase of that constant insensible reproduction which is ordinarily called nutrition. The structures or spatial arrangements and activities maintain themselves as a whole, and together constitute the whole which we call life. They cannot be understood as the separate parts and activities of a machine can be understood; and the spatial arrangements of the parts, including environment, cannot be understood as those of a mechanical system. Life does not exist as something localised in space. Spatial relations are within it, as an expression of it. An organism considered simply as such is blind to its experience. Its reactions are simply the expression of its nature. ... The characteristic distinction of a conscious organism is that it ‘learns’ from experience. This signifies that a conscious nervous response is determined not merely by the simultaneously inflowing influences from all parts of the living body and its environment, but also by what, in order of time, has preceded or will succeed.

Passage 1 · English

In a little while the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people everywhere became an evident social danger, and the government was obliged to resort to such devices as simple decorative work in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles, fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying wages to the younger adults for attendance at schools that would equip them to use the new atomic machinery.... So quite insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation of urban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social system. Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financial considerations have a sweeping way with them, and before a year was out the records of the council show clearly that it was rising to its enormous opportunity, and partly through its own direct control and partly through a series of specific committees, it was planning a new common social order for the entire population of the earth.

Passage 1 · Hungarian

Végre addig jutottunk, hogy a gépek nemcsak hogy megsegítették az embert minden dolgában s megsokszorozták erejét, de egymagukban sokkal tökéletesebben végezték el a munkát, mint ahogy gyarló emberi testünk valaha elvégezhette. Így a művészetek is: képek, szobrok, írásművek, zeneművek, az élet tüneteit, a formát, színt, történetet, érzelmet oly tökéllyel fejezték ki, hogy a való élet messze mögöttük maradt leleményben, szépségben, kifejező erőben. Mi következett ebből? Gépek és művek felülmúlták az embert: tökéletesebbé lettek, s csakhamar ott tartottunk, hogy ha az ember tökéletes akart lenni, utánozni volt kénytelen a gépeket és a műveket, amik egykor az embert utánozták.

Passage 1 · English

For him it is merely a question as to the ambiguity of certain futures, those human acts, namely, which are preceded by deliberation. What are the phenomena here? A representation arises in a mind, but ere it can discharge itself into a train of action, it is inhibited by another which confronts it. This, on the point of discharging itself, is again checked by the first, which returns with a reinforced intensity, and so for a time the pendulum swings to and fro, till finally one or the other representation recurs with such a degree of reinforcement that the tumult ceases, and an act, a decision for the future, or the arrest of a passionate impulse takes place. This stable survival of one representation is called a volition.

Passage 1 · English

The scheme of Europe was no sudden invention, but a way out of long-pressing difficulties. It is plain to modern white civilization that the subjection of the white working classes cannot much longer be maintained. Education, political power, and increased knowledge of the technique and meaning of the industrial process are destined to make a more and more equitable distribution of wealth in the near future. The day of the very rich is drawing to a close, so far as individual white nations are concerned. But there is a loophole. There is a chance for exploitation on an immense scale for inordinate profit, not simply to the very rich, but to the middle class and to the laborers. This chance lies in the exploitation of darker peoples. It is here that the golden hand beckons. Here are no labor unions or votes or questioning onlookers or inconvenient consciences. These men may be used down to the very bone, and shot and maimed in "punitive" expeditions when they revolt. In these dark lands "industrial development" may repeat in exaggerated form every horror of the industrial history of Europe, from slavery and rape to disease and maiming, with only one test of success,--dividends!

Passage 1 · Portuguese

O baptismo do remedio seria a reclame, mas como preceitua o ritual americano: intelligente, berrante, a accordar o publico absorvido na intensa luta pela vida. Paterson, não se achando habilitado para tão difficil tarefa, dirigiu-se a um especialista e contractou por alguns mil dollares o plano da propaganda. Não seria o annuncio esteril de quarta pagina de jornal, mas annuncio que impressionasse por um ou mais sentidos. New-York despertou um dia atordoada com a reclame do nevrozicida. Lia-se o annuncio por toda a parte. Cartazes, affixados nos lugares mais frequentados pelo publico, representavam, em bellissimos chromos, diversos doentes que com o milagroso remedio haviam alcançado a cura. Bandos de palhaços, vestidos de corres berrantes, percorriam as ruas, a fazer piruetas, distribuindo reclames.

Passage 1 · English

The democratic fallacy has been its preoccupation with the origin of government rather than with the processes and results. The democrat has always assumed that if political power could be derived in the right way, it would be beneficent. His whole attention has been on the source of power, since he is hypnotized by the belief that the great thing is to express the will of the people, first because expression is the highest interest of man, and second because the will is instinctively good. But no amount of regulation at the source of a river will completely control its behavior, and while democrats have been absorbed in trying to find a good mechanism for originating social power, that is to say a good mechanism of voting and representation, they neglected almost every other interest of men. For no matter how power originates, the crucial interest is in how power is exercised. What determines the quality of civilization is the use made of power. And that use cannot be controlled at the source.

Passage 1 · English translation

But a working machine must not play the piano, must not feel happy, must not do a whole lot of other things. A gasoline motor must not have tassels or ornaments, Miss Glory. And to manufacture artificial workers is the same thing as the manufacture of a gasoline motor. The process must be the simplest, and the product the best from a practical point of view. The one that is the cheapest. The one whose requirements are the smallest. Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. Everything that makes man more expensive. In fact he rejected man and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul.

Passage 1 · Japanese

こいつを人間が使ってだ　人々がその慾望を楽々と慰められると思ったが　奴等　金持がにっこりと微笑したに止って　機械の運転者――職工――は機構の一部となってしまった　機械的労働　十二時間　十八時間　徹夜！　寝ぼけてしまった職工　だが機械は疲れず高速度回転！　あっ？　機械が腕を喰った　血……血……血………

Passage 1 · English translation

I shall be quite frank: even we have not attained the absolute, exact solution of the problem of happiness. Twice a day, from sixteen to seventeen o'clock and from twenty-one to twenty-two, our united powerful organism dissolves into separate cells; these are the personal hours designated by the Tables. During these hours you would see the curtains discreetly drawn in the rooms of some; others march slowly over the pavement of the main avenue or sit at their desks as I sit now. But I firmly believe, let them call me an idealist and a dreamer, I believe that sooner or later we shall somehow find even for these hours, a place in the general formula. Somehow, all of the 86,400 seconds will be incorporated in the Tables of Hours.

Passage 1 · English

It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four. In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

Passage 1 · English

To attribute these two great developments to the Central Committee, is to take a very narrow view of civilisation. The Central Committee announced the developments, it is true, but they were no more the cause of them than were the kings of the imperialistic period the cause of war. Rather did they yield to some invincible pressure, which came no one knew whither, and which, when gratified, was succeeded by some new pressure equally invincible. To such a state of affairs it is convenient to give the name of progress. No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished. They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions. But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

Passage 1 · Japanese

この穴へ落ち込むと金属を腐蝕させる塩化鉄で衣類や皮膚がだんだん役に立たなくなり、臭素の刺戟で咽喉を破壊し夜の睡眠がとれなくなるばかりではなく頭脳の組織が変化して来て視力さえも薄れて来る。