ssion is neat; but it does not convey the real respects in which
the two things agree, and in which they differ. To begin with, of
course, there is a great deal too much of the bank-book for the sanity
of our commonwealth; and it is highly probable that the health-book,
as conducted in modern conditions, would rapidly become as timid, as
snobbish, and as sterile as the money side of marriage has become. In
the moral atmosphere of modernity the poor and the honest would
probably get as much the worst of it if we fought with health-books as
they do when we fight with bank-books. But that is a more general
matter; the real point is in the difference between the two. The
difference is in this vital fact: that a monied man generally thinks
about money, whereas a healthy man does not think about health. If
the strong young man cannot produce his health-book, it is for the
perfectly simple reason that he has not got one. He can mention some
extraordinary malady he has; but every man of honour is expected to do
that now, whatever may be the decision that follows on the knowledge.

Health is simply Nature, and no naturalist ought to have the impudence
to understand it. Health, one may say, is God; and no agnostic has any
right to claim His acquaintance. For God must mean, among other
things, that mystical and multitudinous balance of all things, by
which they are at least able to stand up straight and endure; and any
scientist who pretends to have exhausted this subject of ultimate
sanity, I will call the lowest of religious fanatics. I will allow him
to understand the madman, for the madman is an exception. But if he
says he understands the sane man, then he says he has the secret of
the Creator. For whenever you and I feel fully sane, we are quite
incapable of naming the elements that make up that mysterious
simplicity. We can no more analyse such peace in the soul than we can
conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by
which, out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like
precipices, He has hanged the world upon nothing.

We conclude, therefore, that unless Eugenic activity be restricted to
monstrous things like mania, there is no constituted or constitutable
authority that can really over-rule men in a matter in which they are
so largely on a level. In the matter of fundamental human rights,
nothing can be above Man, except God. An institution claiming to come
from God might have such auth