"There is the thing,” Kaspar said sadly, pointing to this case, “that betrayed our Garden of Eden, the highest triumph of human ingenuity: the electrical brain!”

“Brain!” I gasped like a fish. “You mean it thinks?” "Yes! Literally! Actually!”

“Aren’t you just trying to fill me up now ?” I had reached what I thought were the limits of credulity.

“It is really very simple,” Kaspar went on, with a patient smile. "You know of many machines in your world that think: a calculating machine or a bookkeeping machine; an automatic telephone exchange; an automatic lathe, and many others. They think, but only on the basis of the present moment. Add to their method experience, that is, retained past perceptions, and you have what we understand ordinarily as thinking.

“Mechanical memory, an association of previously collected perceptions, was what we needed; and when we found them, our machines were able to reason better than we ourselves."

"But how can a machine remember?” I asked the question open-mouthed.

“We discovered a method of storing the electrical visual impulses from the selenium eye, the electrical auditory impulses from the microphone ear, etc., by means of the now familiar retarded oxidation reactions in various metals."

“You mean — what the machine sees or hears is preserved ?” < P> “That is memory, isn't it?” Kaspar said, with infinite patience for my stupid incredulity. “And these stored impressions can be reawakened when desired, repeatedly. The electrical brain remembers better than the human brain. Human ideas come haphazard, by accident; psychologists call it association. In the mechanical brain, all remembered material is systematically indexed.”

“Thinking by electricity! And better than the human product!"