ircus, would say to
your office-boy, whom you had dispatched on an urgent message to
Westminster, and whom you found larking around Euston Station when you
rushed to catch your week-end train. 'Please, sir, I started to go to
Westminster, but there's something funny in my limbs that makes me go up
all manner of streets. I can't help it, sir!' 'Can't you?' you would
say. 'Well, you had better go and be somebody else's office-boy.' Your
brain is something worse than that office-boy, something more
insidiously potent for evil.

I conceive the brain of the average well-intentioned man as possessing
the tricks and manners of one of those gentlemen-at-large who, having
nothing very urgent to do, stroll along and offer their services gratis
to some shorthanded work of philanthropy. They will commonly demoralise
and disorganise the business conduct of an affair in about a fortnight.
They come when they like; they go when they like. Sometimes they are
exceedingly industrious and obedient, but then there is an even chance
that they will shirk and follow their own sweet will. And they mustn't
be spoken to, or pulled up--for have they not kindly volunteered, and
are they not giving their days for naught! These persons are the bane of
the enterprises in which they condescend to meddle. Now, there is a vast
deal too much of the gentleman-at-large about one's brain. One's brain
has no right whatever to behave as a gentleman-at-large: but it in fact
does. It forgets; it flatly ignores orders; at the critical moment when
pressure is highest, it simply lights a cigarette and goes out for a
walk. And we meekly sit down under this behaviour! 'I didn't feel like
stewing,' says the young man who, against his wish, will fail in his
examination. 'The words were out of my mouth before I knew it,' says the
husband whose wife is a woman. 'I couldn't get any inspiration to-day,'
says the artist. 'I can't resist Stilton,' says the fellow who is dying
of greed. 'One can't help one's thoughts,' says the old worrier. And
this last really voices the secret excuse of all five.

And you all say to me: 'My brain is myself. How can I alter myself? I
was born like that.' In the first place you were not born 'like that,'
you have lapsed to that. And in the second place your brain is not
yourself. It is only a part of yourself, and not the highest seat of
authority. Do you love your mother, wife, or children with your brain?
Do you desire with your brain? Do