He reads other people's books, collects their opinions, and so forms a whole for himself, which resembles an automaton made up of anything but flesh and blood.

The boy loathed the clinging dignities that made of him, at home, a royal automaton, tricked out in tarnished gold lace, faded velvets, and pompous airs.

Seeing them now, I began to understand how an enforced docility may reduce a whole people to the level of dazed, unresisting automatons.

But the most curious part of his information was, that a large number of them were born without any intellectual vigour, and wandered about as so many automatons, under the care of the government, until they were illuminated with the mental ray from some earthly brains, by means of the mysterious influence which the moon is known to exercise on our planet.