a matter of
medical benefit; if I have ventured to point out some drawbacks, it is
only by way of showing that, even from the strictly medical standpoint the
cult of uniformity, of standardization, of mechanical perfection, is not
free from fault. But the great objection against that attitude of mind
which is typified in the appeal to the analogy of machinery is far more
vital. Our only interest in a machine is that we shall get out of it as
much, and as exact, work as possible. Our interest in our bodies is not so
limited. We may deliberately choose to forego the maximum of mechanical
perfection for the sake of living our lives in a way more satisfactory to
us than a constant care for that perfection would permit. Even the most
ardent of health enthusiasts--unless he be an insane fanatic--draws the
line somewhere. What he forgets is that other people prefer to draw the
line somewhere else. They choose to run a certain amount of risk rather
than have their health on their minds. To compel--whether by legal means
or by social pressure--every man to take precautions concerning his own
body which he deliberately prefers not to take; to make impossible, in
this most intimate and personal of all human concerns, the various ways of
acting which the infinite varieties of temperament and desire may
dictate--this would be such an invasion of personal liberty, such a
suppression of individuality, as would strike us all as appalling, had we
not grown so habituated to the mechanical, the statistical, measurement of
human values--to the Flatland view of life.

* * * * *

What gives to these movements that I have been discussing the character
which I have been ascribing to them is not so much the specific things
which they severally aim to accomplish, but the spirit in which they are
carried on, and perhaps still more the spirit, or want of spirit, with
which they are met. It is not that a balance is falsely struck between the
benefit of the concrete, circumscribed, measurable improvement aimed at
and the injury done to some deeper, more pervading, and quite immeasurable
element or principle of life; it is that the balance is not struck at all.
The subtler, the less tangible, element is simply ignored. It was not
always so. It was not so in the last generation, or the generation before
that. The phenomenon is one that is closely bound up with the ruling
tendency of thought and action in all directions;