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What a feather it would be in my cap if I should succeed in making these automata reflect! if I could make them understand that their work is a Penelope's web, which they are condemned to unravel at one end as fast as they weave at the other!
These things are mere automata: they cannot help shrinking from death at any cost. You see that they have no self-control, and are merely shuddering through a series of reflexes. One of you two is to be destroyed. Which of you shall it be? STREPHON. Thats better. THE NEWLY BORN. Much better. How could either of us live without the other? ECRASIA. The woman is more sensible than the man.
Before continuing my narration of what happened further to the unfortunate Nathanael, I will tell you, indulgent reader, in case you take any interest in that skilful mechanician and fabricator of automata, Spalanzani, that he recovered completely from his wounds.
You stood by them like a man; and you true wife and the woman that you are you would have bought him release from torture at cost to yourself of slow starvation and death well, it humbles a body to think what your sex can do when it comes to self-sacrifice. I'll book you both for my colony; you'll like it there; it's a Factory where I'm going to turn groping and grubbing automata into men."
So did the creole. Red won. The automata chucked sixteen hundred pounds to the Klosking, and six hundred pounds to the other lady. Ina bet forty pounds on black. Red won again. She put two hundred pounds on black: black won. She doubled: black won again. She doubled: black won. Doubled again: black won. The creole and others stood with her in that last run, and the money was chucked.
The firemen, just roused from their dream of comfort, no more passed round the coarse jest, no more whistled "Boatman, dance," but, like automata, threw the fuel into the roaring furnaces. Occasionally, the startling note of the great bell roused the deck-watch from his slumber, and he sang over again the monotonous song that told the pilot how far his keel was from the sands below.
There were the starlings, returned from the fields, and looking like little speckled rooks; some sparrows, and a couple of robins hopping about in their wild startled manner; in strange contrast to these last appeared that little feathered clodhopper, the chaffinch, plodding over the turf as if he had hobnailed boots on his feet; last, but not least, came statuesque blackbirds and thrushes, moving, when they moved, like automata.
The confidence of the supporters of the mechanical theories of earlier days, from Descartes onward, that animals and the bodies of men were machines, mechanical automata, down to the mechanical theories of Lamettrie and Holbach, of l’homme machine, and of the système de la nature, was at least as great as, probably greater than, that of the supporters of the modern theories.
Tycho resumes his Astronomical Observations Is attacked with a Painful Disease His Sufferings and Death in 1601 His Funeral His Temper His Turn for Satire and Raillery His Piety Account of his Astronomical Discoveries His Love of Astrology and Alchymy Observations on the Character of the Alchymists Tycho's Elixir His Fondness for the Marvellous His Automata and Invisible Bells Account of the Idiot, called Lep, whom he kept as a Prophet History of Tycho's Instruments His great Brass Globe preserved at Copenhagen Present state of the Island of Huen.
They are automata of the most perfect kind, rendering the engine and machine-maker in a great measure independent of inferior workmen. For the machine tools have no unsteady hand, are not careless nor clumsy, do not work by rule of thumb, and cannot make mistakes.
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