# Humans Are Machinate Mammals with Limbs Outside the Body by Samuel Butler > “Man, he said, was a machinate mammal. The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their own bodies, but many of man’s are loose, and lie about detached, now here and now there, in various parts of the world.” > **— Samuel Butler's answering writer**, *1872, Erewhon, Chapter XXV, “The Machines—concluded”* ## Sources and Context - **Primary text:** [*Erewhon*, Chapter XXV, Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1906/pg1906-images.html). Butler introduces this passage as the response of a separate, unnamed writer to the anti-machine professor's treatise. It is the novel's staged counterargument: machines can be read as external human limbs rather than autonomous successors. “He said” refers to that answering writer. - The passage anticipates an extended-mind analogy but does not establish that every tool is constitutive of cognition or that an external device is conscious. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Simple Reminders|Simple Reminders]] - **Article:** [[articles/Analog Cognition and the Architecture of Continuity|Analog Cognition and the Architecture of Continuity]] - **Article:** [[articles/The Next Interface Layer|The Next Interface Layer]] - **Wiki map:** [[wiki/Extended Mind Thesis|Extended Mind Thesis]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Erewhon|Erewhon]] - [[wiki/Samuel Butler|Samuel Butler]] - [[wiki/Extended Mind Thesis|Extended Mind Thesis]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Man, he said, was a machinate mammal. The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their own bodies, but many of man’s are loose, and lie about detached, now here and now there, in various parts of the world.” — Samuel Butler's answering writer, Erewhon, 1872 https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-butler-machinate-mammal-external-limbs ```