elf but to the people he meets _en route_,
and the people who are overtaking him and whom he is overtaking. My aim
is to show that only an inappreciable fraction of our ordered and
sustained efforts is given to the business of actual living, as
distinguished from the preliminaries to living.

III

THE BRAIN AS A GENTLEMAN-AT-LARGE

It is not as if, in this business of daily living, we were seriously
hampered by ignorance either as to the results which we ought to obtain,
or as to the general means which we must employ in order to obtain them.
With all our absorption in the mere preliminaries to living, and all our
carelessness about living itself, we arrive pretty soon at a fairly
accurate notion of what satisfactory living is, and we perceive with
some clearness the methods necessary to success. I have pictured the man
who wakes up in the middle of the night and sees the horrid semi-fiasco
of his life. But let me picture the man who wakes up refreshed early on
a fine summer morning and looks into his mind with the eyes of hope and
experience, not experience and despair. That man will pass a delightful
half-hour in thinking upon the scheme of the universe as it affects
himself. He is quite clear that contentment depends on his own acts, and
that no power can prevent him from performing those acts. He plans
everything out, and before he gets up he knows precisely what he must
and will do in certain foreseen crises and junctures. He sincerely
desires to live efficiently--who would wish to make a daily mess of
existence?--and he knows the way to realise the desire.

And yet, mark me! That man will not have been an hour on his feet on
this difficult earth before the machine has unmistakably gone wrong: the
machine which was designed to do this work of living, which is capable
of doing it thoroughly well, but which has not been put into order!
What is the use of consulting the map of life and tracing the itinerary,
and getting the machine out of the shed, and making a start, if half the
nuts are loose, or the steering pillar is twisted, or there is no petrol
in the tank? (Having asked this question, I will drop the
mechanico-vehicular comparison, which is too rough and crude for the
delicacy of the subject.) Where has the human machine gone wrong? It has
gone wrong in the brain. What, is he 'wrong in the head'? Most
assuredly, most strictly. He knows--none better--that when his wife
employs a particular tone cont