singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong
we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things
go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a
theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice,
to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must
have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at
all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right
to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.

It is then necessary to drop one's daily agnosticism and attempt rerum
cognoscere causas. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy
man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely
that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to
be dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more
complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be
the theorist who is needed to deal with it; and in some extreme cases,
no one but the man (probably insane) who invented your flying-ship could
possibly say what was the matter with it.

"Efficiency," of course, is futile for the same reason that strong men,
will-power and the superman are futile. That is, it is futile because
it only deals with actions after they have been performed. It has no
philosophy for incidents before they happen; therefore it has no power
of choice. An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it is
over; if it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right or wrong.
There is no such thing as backing a winner; for he cannot be a winner
when he is backed. There is no such thing as fighting on the winning
side; one fights to find out which is the winning side. If any operation
has occurred, that operation was efficient. If a man is murdered, the
murder was efficient. A tropical sun is as efficient in making people
lazy as a Lancashire foreman bully in making them energetic. Maeterlinck
is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors as
Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell are in filling a man with jam. But it
all depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery, being
a modern skeptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I, being an
orthodox Christian, prefer the jam. But both are efficient when they
have been effected; and inefficient until they are effected. A man who
thinks much about success must be the dro