Claim · 1872 · publication · Stated in source · Supported

Erewhon (1872) quotes its fictional treatise as saying that machines’ possessing little consciousness now is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness.

One recorded claim. The claim panel gives its qualification, the source passages with their place in each source, and how it was checked.

What it connects

Erewhon, or Over the Range → articulates → A machine could think

Where it appears

Antecedent texts: machine intelligence before 1965 →

Claim and evidence

Erewhon, or Over the Rangearticulates ↓A machine could think

Machine-checkedStated in sourceSupported

Supporting evidence: primary · 1 source

Date: 1872 · publication Records dated 1872 →
Role: Articulation
Register (kind of text): Fiction

Scope and limitsFiction: the narrator quotes the Erewhonian treatise’s ‘own words’. The passage documents what the novel says, not Butler’s view. The dataset records the same passage on B5 as context. Just before the quoted passage the treatise imagines ‘some new phase of mind’ unlike any consciousness known; a second check by a model of another family read mechanical consciousness as a literal mental state that meets the criterion, with that difference kept. Butler’s satirical letter of 1863, “Darwin among the Machines”, is the earliest located text on this proposition; Erewhon is the earliest located novel.

The evidence 01

primary sourceSupports the claim

Erewhon, or Over the Range

Trübner & Co. · 1872

Cite the original source

Cite the original document, not Selekoa. Check these details against it.

Source excerpt

“There is no security […] against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now.”

Location in source Chapter XXI, 'The Book of the Machines', p. 191

How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher

Machine-checked · 2026-11-04

Source details and check notes

Authors: Samuel Butler (published anonymously)
Version: Internet Archive scan of the 1872 printing (ErewhonOverrang00Butl, Smithsonian Libraries copy); quoted passages read on the page images of pp. 191, 196, 197, 200, 201 and 221. The OCR text was used to locate them.
Canonical address: Open the canonical source ↗
Accessed: 2026-10-06
Language: English (en)
Attribution: [Samuel Butler], Erewhon, or Over the Range (London: Trübner & Co., 1872), Internet Archive scan.
Reuse: Public domain (published 1872; the author died in 1902).. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each) under Selekoa’s quotation policy. Public-domain text.
Check notes: Candidate pack passage, antecedent texts (research/prehistory). The quotation (20 words) matched a fresh retrieval of 2026-11-04 (SHA-256 4c0b3116d03b…, the file the candidate pack read). Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes, line-break hyphens and Unicode compatibility forms, so the source’s typography can differ. The omitted words are the narrator’s ‘—to quote his own words—‘. No human editorial review.

Status and meaning

Editorial status. Machine-checked. Machines found this record and checked it against its sources; no person accepted it individually. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.

Relation. A passage of the document meets the proposition’s criterion. The record documents what the text states, in its register (fiction and satire are labelled); it is not evidence that the proposition is true and implies no influence on or from another text.

Date. Year on the title page of the inspected 1872 Trübner printing (Smithsonian Libraries copy, catalogued as the first edition). Butler’s later prefaces give March 1872.

Record ID pre-u02-erewhon-1872