The Human Machine | Page 3

And
it's all turns--I can't see a hundred yards in front.' He has a wild idea of
trying to force the County Council to sand-paper the road, or of
employing the new Territorial Army to remove the hill. But he
dismisses that idea--he is so reasonable. He accepts all. He sits clothed
in reasonableness on the machine, and accepts all. 'Ass!' you exclaim.
'Why doesn't he get down and inflate that tyre, for one thing? Anyone
can see the sparking apparatus is wrong, and it's perfectly certain the
gear-box wants oil.
Why doesn't he--?' I will tell you why he doesn't. Just because he isn't
aware that he is on a machine at all. He has never examined what he is
on. And at the back of his consciousness is a dim idea that he is
perched on a piece of solid, immutable rock that runs on castors.

II
AMATEURS IN THE ART OF LIVING
Considering that we have to spend the whole of our lives in this human
machine, considering that it is our sole means of contact and
compromise with the rest of the world, we really do devote to it very
little attention. When I say 'we,' I mean our inmost spirits, the
instinctive part, the mystery within that exists. And when I say 'the

human machine' I mean the brain and the body--and chiefly the brain.
The expression of the soul by means of the brain and body is what we
call the art of 'living.' We certainly do not learn this art at school to any
appreciable extent. At school we are taught that it is necessary to fling
our arms and legs to and fro for so many hours per diem. We are also
shown, practically, that our brains are capable of performing certain
useful tricks, and that if we do not compel our brains to perform those
tricks we shall suffer. Thus one day we run home and proclaim to our
delighted parents that eleven twelves are 132. A feat of the brain! So it
goes on until our parents begin to look up to us because we can chatter
of cosines or sketch the foreign policy of Louis XIV. Good! But not a
word about the principles of the art of living yet! Only a few detached
rules from our parents, to be blindly followed when particular crises
supervene. And, indeed, it would be absurd to talk to a schoolboy about
the expression of his soul. He would probably mutter a monosyllable
which is not 'mice.'
Of course, school is merely a preparation for living; unless one goes to
a university, in which case it is a preparation for university. One is
supposed to turn one's attention to living when these preliminaries are
over--say at the age of about twenty. Assuredly one lives then; there is,
however, nothing new in that, for one has been living all the time, in a
fashion; all the time one has been using the machine without
understanding it. But does one, school and college being over, enter
upon a study of the machine? Not a bit. The question then becomes, not
how to live, but how to obtain and retain a position in which one will
be able to live; how to get minute portions of dead animals and plants
which one can swallow, in order not to die of hunger; how to acquire
and constantly renew a stock of other portions of dead animals and
plants in which one can envelop oneself in order not to die of cold; how
to procure the exclusive right of entry into certain huts where one may
sleep and eat without being rained upon by the clouds of heaven. And
so forth. And when one has realised this ambition, there comes the
desire to be able to double the operation and do it, not for oneself alone,
but for oneself and another. Marriage! But no scientific sustained
attention is yet given to the real business of living, of smooth
intercourse, of self-expression, of conscious adaptation to

environment--in brief, to the study of the machine. At thirty the
chances are that a man will understand better the draught of a chimney
than his own respiratory apparatus--to name one of the simple, obvious
things--and as for understanding the working of his own brain--what an
idea! As for the skill to avoid the waste of power involved by friction in
the business of living, do we give an hour to it in a month? Do we ever
at all examine it save in an amateurish and clumsy fashion? A young
lady produces a water-colour drawing. 'Very nice!' we say, and add, to
ourselves, 'For an amateur.' But our living is more amateurish than that
young lady's drawing; though surely we ought every one