The Lost World Classics - Ultimate Collection. Жюль Верн

Anything which can receive a stimulus, that can react to a stimulus and retains memory of a stimulus must be called an intelligent, conscious entity. The gap between what we have long called the organic and the inorganic is steadily decreasing. Do you know of the remarkable experiments of Lillie upon various metals?”

      “Vaguely,” I said.

      “Lillie,” he went on, “proved that under the electric current and other exciting mediums metals exhibited practically every reaction of the human nerve and muscle. It grew weary, rested, and after resting was perceptibly stronger than before; it got what was practically indigestion, and it exhibited a peculiar but unmistakable memory. Also, he found, it could acquire disease and die.

      “Lillie concluded that there existed a real metallic consciousness. It was Le Bon who first proved also that metal is more sensitive than man, and that its immobility is only apparent. (Le Bon in “Evolution of Matter,” Chapter eleven.)

      “Take the block of magnetic iron that stands so gray and apparently lifeless, subject it to a magnetic current lifeless, what happens? The iron block is composed of molecules which under ordinary conditions are disposed in all possible directions indifferently. But when the current passes through there is tremendous movement in that apparently inert mass. All of the tiny particles of which it is composed turn and shift until their north poles all point more or less approximately in the direction of the magnetic force.

      “When that happens the block itself becomes a magnet, filled with and surrounded by a field of magnetic energy; instinct with it. Outwardly it has not moved; actually there has been prodigious motion.”

      “But it is not conscious motion,” I objected.

      “Ah, but how do you know?” he asked. “If Jacques Loeb is right, that action of the iron molecules is every bit as conscious a movement as the least and the greatest of our own. There is absolutely no difference between them.

      “Your and my and its every movement is nothing but an involuntary and inevitable reaction to a certain stimulus. If he’s right, then I’m a buttercup — but that’s neither here nor there. Loeb — all he did was to restate destiny, one of humanity’s oldest ideas, in the terms of tropisms, infusoria and light. Omar Khayyam chemically reincarnated in the Rockefeller Institute. Nevertheless those who accept his theories have to admit that there is essentially no difference between their impulses and the rush of filings toward a magnet.

      “Equally nevertheless, Goodwin, the iron does meet Haeckel’s three tests — it can receive a stimulus, it does react to that stimulus and it retains memory of it; for even after the current has ceased it remains changed in tensile strength, conductivity and other qualities that were modified by the passage of that current; and as time passes this memory fades. Precisely as some human experience increases wariness, caution, which keying up of qualities remains with us after the experience has passed, and fades away in the ratio of our sensitivity plus retentiveness divided by the time elapsing from the original experience — exactly as it is in the iron.”

      Chapter XVI.

       Conscious Metal!

       Table of Contents

      “Granted,” I acquiesced. “We now come to their means of locomotion. In its simplest terms all locomotion is progress through space against the force of gravitation. Man’s walk is a series of rhythmic stumbles against this force that constantly strives to drag him down to earth’s face and keep him pressed there. Gravitation is an etheric — magnetic vibration akin to the force which holds, to use your simile again, Drake, the filing against the magnet. A walk is a constant breaking of the current.

      “Take a motion picture of a man walking and run it through the lantern rapidly and he seems to be flying. We have none of the awkward fallings and recoveries that are the tempo of walking as we see it.

      “I take it that the movement of these Things is a conscious breaking of the gravitational current just as much as is our own movement, but by a rhythm so swift that it appears to be continuous.

      “Doubtless if we could so control our sight as to admit the vibrations of light slowly enough we would see this apparently smooth motion as a series of leaps — just as we do when the motion-picture operator slows down his machine sufficiently to show us walking in a series of stumbles.

      “Very well — so far, then, we have nothing in this phenomenon which the human mind cannot conceive as possible; therefore intellectually we still remain masters of the phenomena; for it is only that which human thought cannot encompass which it need fear.”

      “Metallic,” he said, “and crystalline. And yet — why not? What are we but bags of skin filled with certain substances in solution and stretched over a supporting and mobile mechanism largely made up of lime? Out of that primeval jelly which Gregory calls Protobion came after untold millions of years us with our skins, our nails, and our hair; came, too, the serpents with their scales, the birds with their feathers; the horny hide of the rhinoceros and the fairy wings of the butterfly; the shell of the crab, the gossamer loveliness of the moth and the shimmering wonder of the mother-of-pearl.

      “Is there any greater gap between any of these and the metallic? I think not.”

      “Not materially,” I answered. “No. But there remains — consciousness!”

      “That,” he said, “I cannot understand. Ventnor spoke of — how did he put it? — a group consciousness, operating in our sphere and in spheres above and below ours, with senses known and unknown. I got — glimpses — Goodwin, but I cannot understand.”

      “We have agreed for reasons that seem sufficient to us to call these Things metallic, Dick,” I replied. “But that does not necessarily mean that they are composed of any metal that we know. Nevertheless, being metal, they must be of crystalline structure.

      “As Gregory has pointed out, crystals and what we call living matter had an equal start in the first essentials of life. We cannot conceive life without giving it the attribute of some sort of consciousness. Hunger cannot be anything but conscious, and there is no other stimulus to eat but hunger.

      “The crystals eat. The extraction of power from food is conscious because it is purposeful, and there can be no purpose without consciousness; similarly the power to work from such derived energy is also purposeful and therefore conscious. The crystals do both. And the crystals can transmit all these abilities to their children, just as we do. For although there would seem to be no reason why they should not continue to grow to gigantic size under favorable conditions — yet they do not. They reach a size beyond which they do not develop.

      “Instead, they bud — give birth, in fact — to smaller ones, which increase until they reach the size of the preceding generation. And like the children of man and animals, these younger generations grow on precisely as their progenitors!

      “Very well, then — we arrive at the conception of a metallically crystalline being, which by some explosion of the force of evolution has burst from the to us familiar and apparently inert stage into these Things that hold us. And is there any greater difference between the forms with which we are familiar and them than there is between us and the crawling amphibian which is our remote ancestor? Or between that and the amoeba — the little swimming stomach from which it evolved? Or the amoeba and the inert jelly of the Protobion?

      “As for what Ventnor calls a group consciousness I would assume that he means a communal intelligence such as that shown by the bees and the ants — that in the case of the former Maeterlinck calls the ‘Spirit of the Hive.’ It is shown in their groupings — just as the geometric arrangement of those groupings shows also clearly their crystalline intelligence.

      “I submit that in their rapid coordination either for attack or movement or work without apparent communication having passed between the units, there is nothing more remarkable than the swarming of a hive of bees where also without apparent communication just so many waxmakers, nurses, honey-gatherers,