-engines is not that men
pay for them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that men
are killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them. The evil
is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain. The wrong is
not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired
enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are
mechanical.

In this matter, then, as in all the other matters treated in this book,
our main conclusion is that it is a fundamental point of view, a
philosophy or religion which is needed, and not any change in habit or
social routine. The things we need most for immediate practical
purposes are all abstractions. We need a right view of the human lot,
a right view of the human society; and if we were living eagerly and
angrily in the enthusiasm of those things, we should, ipso facto, be
living simply in the genuine and spiritual sense. Desire and danger
make every one simple. And to those who talk to us with interfering
eloquence about Jaeger and the pores of the skin, and about Plasmon and
the coats of the stomach, at them shall only be hurled the words that
are hurled at fops and gluttons, "Take no thought what ye shall eat or
what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. For after all
these things do the Gentiles seek. But seek first the kingdom of God
and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."
Those amazing words are not only extraordinarily good, practical
politics; they are also superlatively good hygiene. The one supreme
way of making all those processes go right, the processes of health,
and strength, and grace, and beauty, the one and only way of making
certain of their accuracy, is to think about something else. If a man
is bent on climbing into the seventh heaven, he may be quite easy about
the pores of his skin. If he harnesses his waggon to a star, the
process will have a most satisfactory effect upon the coats of his
stomach. For the thing called "taking thought," the thing for which
the best modern word is "rationalizing," is in its nature, inapplicable
to all plain and urgent things. Men take thought and ponder
rationalistically, touching remote things--things that only
theoretically matter, such as the transit of Venus. But only at their
peril can men rationalize about so practical a matter as health.

XI Science and the Savages

A permanent disadvantage of the study of folk-lore an