d elegant that it is impossible for the patient not to be
hypochondriacally melancholic; or, even if he were not, he must surely
become so because of the elegance of the things you have said and the
accuracy of your reasoning." We might multiply examples, for all we
need do would be to call up Moliere's doctors, one after the other.
However far, moreover, comic fancy may seem to go, reality at times
undertakes to improve upon it. It was suggested to a contemporary
philosopher, an out-and-out arguer, that his arguments, though
irreproachable in their deductions, had experience against them. He put
an end to the discussion by merely remarking, "Experience is in the
wrong." The truth is, this idea of regulating life as a matter of
business routine is more widespread than might be imagined; it is
natural in its way, although we have just obtained it by an artificial
process of reconstruction. One might say that it gives us the very
quintessence of pedantry, which, at bottom, is nothing else than art
pretending to outdo nature.

To sum up, then, we have one and the same effect, which assumes ever
subtler forms as it passes from the idea of an artificial MECHANISATION
of the human body, if such an expression is permissible, to that of any
substitution whatsoever of the artificial for the natural. A less and
less rigorous logic, that more and more resembles the logic of
dreamland, transfers the same relationship into higher and higher
spheres, between increasingly immaterial terms, till in the end we find
a mere administrative enactment occupying the same relation to a
natural or moral law that a ready-made garment, for instance, does to
the living body. We have now gone right to the end of the first of the
three directions we had to follow. Let us turn to the second and see
where it will lead us.

2. Our starting-point is again "something mechanical encrusted upon the
living." Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the
fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, it
seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of
suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. But
this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body.
It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher
principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When
we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is
because we disre