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about erewhon
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"I learnt that about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical
knowledge was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious
rapidity, until one of the most learned professors of hypothetics wrote an
extraordinary book (...), proving that the machines were ultimately destined
to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as
different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable
life. So convincing was his reasoning, or unreasoning, to this effect, that
he carried the country with him; and they made a clean sweep of all
machinery that had not been in use for more than two hundred and seventy-one
years (which period was arrived at after a series of compromises), and
strictly forbade all further improvements and inventions under pain of being
considered in the eye of the law to be labouring under typhus fever, which
they regard as one of the worst of all crimes."
(Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872)
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