Chemistry Reference
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nature is finally demonstrated when he hurls her to the floor causing her
dismemberment. But Nathanael, too, is destroyed by his dalliance with
mechanism and the deluding instruments of Coppelius. Under the spell
of the distorting telescope he flings himself to his death from the top of a
tower. Simultaneous fascination with, and fear of, mechanism is also ap-
parent in Ambrose Bierce's story, 'Moxon's Master' (1894). Bierce's
story is important because it explicitly discusses, through a dialogue be-
tween the narrator and the scientist-inventor Moxon, who has constructed
a chess-playing automaton, the question of what, if anything, distin-
guishes living systems from machines. Instead of the mechanist view that
all organisms are merely complex machines, Moxon takes the contrary
view, namely that “all matter is sentient, that every atom is a living, feel-
ing, conscious being” (Bierce 1946). He claims to have shown that plants
think and he now believes that even the constituent atoms of minerals
think, as they arrange themselves into mathematically perfect patterns.
Moxon has made a machine to entertain himself and to demonstrate his
theories; but he has not worked through the consequences, for it is the
validity of those very theories that is his undoing. In accordance with
Moxon's own postulates, the machine is alive and therefore not content
to accept a subservient, machine-like role. In frustration at losing the
game and anger against its opponent, it reaches forward and strangles its
creator with its iron hands. This ending looks back to
Frankenstein
and
forward to the twentieth-century stereotype of the scientist unable to con-
trol his created beings.
Conceived eighty years after
Frankenstein
, Wells'
The Island of Dr
Moreau
(1896), although its protagonist is a biologist, draws heavily on
the same tradition of the alchemist and his attempts to produce life by
mechanical means. Forced to flee England because of his illegal research
in vivisection, Moreau works in isolation in his island laboratory creating
his Beast People by vivisecting and transplanting parts from various liv-
ing creatures to produce new hybrids, the biological counterparts of in-
terchangeable, modular constructions. Like Frankenstein and Moxon,
Moreau dies when his creatures revolt against him.
In twentieth-century mainstream fiction the successors to chess-play-
ing automata were robots. These have been used largely to encapsulate
the amoral mentality that the authors associated with scientists, engineers
