to restore the waste
of the body sustained by the action on it of the force of life or
zoo-dynamic which inhabits it? The demands for food will vary and vary
much according to the way in which we answer this question. As you
allowed me to discuss this question in _Healthy Life_ in July and
August of last year I must not take up your space by discussing it
again. But the answer we give determines the amounts of food that we
require to take, since, obviously, if the strength and heat of the
body depend upon the food, the more food we take the more strength and
heat shall we have; while, if the function of food in the adult or
grown body is only to restore the waste of the body, the question is
how much is the waste. There are various ways in which this question
can be answered and I cannot go into them now; but I say, in my
opinion, the waste is very much less than is commonly supposed. The
body, I take it, is made by zoo-dynamic or the life-force to be a fit
habitation for itself. The body must waste when the life-force acts
through it, and that waste must be restored by food and sleep, or the
body will die; since things (the body) cannot act as the medium of
conveying forces (zoo-dynamic or the life-force) without wasting under
their action. But so beautifully has the body been made by zoo-dynamic
that it wastes very little, much less than is commonly supposed, by
the action of zoo-dynamic through it. Not seeing this, we ingest into
the body far more than is required to restore its waste, and so we
fall ill, for, obviously, if we ingest more than the quantity
necessary for this purpose we choke the body up and render it
inefficient for its purpose as an instrument for work.

Now this is precisely what seems to me to happen in life. As we are
all under the double delusion that the strength of the body and its
heat come from the food, we all with one accord put far too much food
into the body, and when we find that we die, all of us, generation
after generation, at from 50 to 70 years of age, we make up little
proverbs to justify our unphysiological conduct and say that three
score years and ten are the measure of the duration of life. M.D. says
that "some twenty years ago most people lived fairly close to the old
physiological quantities" (but what are these? for we have seen how
they vary), "now they have been cut adrift from these and are
floundering out of their depth." May I remind M.D. that people are now
living lo