Page:Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924, E.P. Dutton & Company).pdf/14

 DAEDALUS

identical, and what we were watching that evening was the detonation of a world on which too many men came out to look at the stars when they should have been dancing.

These two scenes suggest, very briefly, a part of the case against science. Has mankind released from the womb of matter a Demogorgon which is already beginning to turn against him, and may at any moment hurl him into the bottomless void? Or is Samuel Butler’s even more horrible vision correct, in which man becomes a mere parasite of machinery, an appendage to the repro- ductive system of huge and complicated engines which will successively usurp his activities, and end by ousting him from the mastery of this planet? Is the machine-minder engaged on

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