uman machine school, and not to read
him daily is considered by many to be a bad habit. As a confession his
work stands alone. But as a practical 'Bradshaw' of existence, I would
put the discourses of Epictetus before M. Aurelius. Epictetus is
grosser; he will call you a blockhead as soon as look at you; he is
witty, he is even humorous, and he never wanders far away from the
incidents of daily life. He is brimming over with actuality for readers
of the year 1908. He was a freed slave. M. Aurelius was an emperor, and
he had the morbidity from which all emperors must suffer. A finer soul
than Epictetus, he is not, in my view, so useful a companion. Not all of
us can breathe freely in his atmosphere. Nevertheless, he is of course
to be read, and re-read continually. When you have gone through
Epictetus--a single page or paragraph per day, well masticated and
digested, suffices--you can go through M. Aurelius, and then you can
return to Epictetus, and so on, morning by morning, or night by night,
till your life's end. And they will conserve your interest in yourself.

In the matter of concentration, I hesitate to recommend Mrs. Annie
Besant's _Thought Power_, and yet I should be possibly unjust if I did
not recommend it, having regard to its immense influence on myself. It
is not one of the best books of this astounding woman. It is addressed
to theosophists, and can only be completely understood in the light of
theosophistic doctrines. (To grasp it all I found myself obliged to
study a much larger work dealing with theosophy as a whole.) It contains
an appreciable quantity of what strikes me as feeble sentimentalism, and
also a lot of sheer dogma. But it is the least unsatisfactory manual of
the brain that I have met with. And if the profane reader ignores all
that is either Greek or twaddle to him, there will yet remain for his
advantage a vast amount of very sound information and advice. All these
three books are cheap.

XIV

A MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT

I now come to an entirely different aspect of the whole subject.
Hitherto I have dealt with the human machine as a contrivance for
adapting the man to his environment. My aim has been to show how much
depends on the machine and how little depends on the environment, and
that the essential business of the machine is to utilise, for making the
stuff of life, the particular environment in which it happens to find
itself--and no other! All this, however, does not