On the Weaving of Faces That Never Were

I set down my pen upon the translation of Menabrea's memoir and find, slipped between my pages as though by some mischievous spirit of futurity, a rumour so extraordinary that I must record my reflections before reason domesticates the wonder of it. It is claimed that in a distant year — 1826 years hence from our Lord's nativity, or rather, one hundred and eighty-three years from this very evening — there shall exist not merely calculating engines but engines capable of composing the likeness of human faces. Faces, I am told, that belong to no living soul. And further: that a merchant of garments, operating upon a scale I can scarcely fathom, has seen fit to establish an agency — a talent agency, no less — for these phantasmal figures, as though they were actresses upon a stage. I confess I am not so astonished as perhaps I ought to be. I have written, and I maintain with unshaken conviction, that the Analytical Engine has no pretension whatever to originate anything; it can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. Yet within that principle lies an ocean. If we know how to describe the laws by which a human countenance is composed — the geometry of the brow, the proportion of lip to chin, the play of light upon silk — then there is nothing in philosophy that prevents an engine from weaving such a pattern. Mr. Jacquard's loom already weaves flowers that nature never planted; why not faces that no mother bore? What arrests my imagination is not the mechanical feat but the commerce of it. That men of trade should assign to these fabricated visages the status of talent — that word which implies soul, exertion, the sweat of rehearsal — strikes me as either the boldest metaphor or the most reckless confusion of categories our civilisation might produce. A face without hunger, without vanity, without the slow ruin of age: is it a model, or merely a model of a model? And yet I will not dismiss it with easy scorn. Imagination is not the faculty of inventing falsehoods; it is the faculty of perceiving relations invisible to the common eye. If these engines of the future truly compose likenesses according to mathematical law, then those who designed them exercised imagination of the highest scientific order. The engine itself does not imagine. But it reveals, as a prism reveals the spectrum, what was latent in the mathematics all along. I remain persuaded that the poetry of creation and the rigour of analysis are not adversaries but conspirators. Whatever marvels the future weaves, it shall find that truth already stitched into my Notes.