The Human Machine | Page 5

refreshed early on a fine summer morning and looks into his mind with
the eyes of hope and experience, not experience and despair. That man
will pass a delightful half-hour in thinking upon the scheme of the
universe as it affects himself. He is quite clear that contentment
depends on his own acts, and that no power can prevent him from
performing those acts. He plans everything out, and before he gets up
he knows precisely what he must and will do in certain foreseen crises
and junctures. He sincerely desires to live efficiently--who would wish
to make a daily mess of existence?--and he knows the way to realise the
desire.
And yet, mark me! That man will not have been an hour on his feet on
this difficult earth before the machine has unmistakably gone wrong:
the machine which was designed to do this work of living, which is
capable of doing it thoroughly well, but which has not been put into
order! What is the use of consulting the map of life and tracing the
itinerary, and getting the machine out of the shed, and making a start, if
half the nuts are loose, or the steering pillar is twisted, or there is no
petrol in the tank? (Having asked this question, I will drop the
mechanico-vehicular comparison, which is too rough and crude for the
delicacy of the subject.) Where has the human machine gone wrong? It
has gone wrong in the brain. What, is he 'wrong in the head'? Most
assuredly, most strictly. He knows--none better--that when his wife
employs a particular tone containing ten grains of asperity, and he
replies in a particular tone containing eleven grains, the consequences
will be explosive. He knows, on the other hand, that if he replies in a

tone containing only one little drop of honey, the consequences may
not be unworthy of two reasonable beings. He knows this. His brain is
fully instructed. And lo! his brain, while arguing that women are really
too absurd (as if that was the point), is sending down orders to the
muscles of the throat and mouth which result in at least eleven grains of
asperity, and conjugal relations are endangered for the day. He didn't
want to do it. His desire was not to do it. He despises himself for doing
it. But his brain was not in working order. His brain ran
away--'raced'--on its own account, against reason, against desire,
against morning resolves--and there he is!
That is just one example, of the simplest and slightest. Examples can be
multiplied. The man may be a young man whose immediate future
depends on his passing an examination--an examination which he is
capable of passing 'on his head,' which nothing can prevent him from
passing if only his brain will not be so absurd as to give orders to his
legs to walk out of the house towards the tennis court instead of
sending them upstairs to the study; if only, having once safely lodged
him in the study, his brain will devote itself to the pages of books
instead of dwelling on the image of a nice girl--not at all like other girls.
Or the man may be an old man who will live in perfect comfort if only
his brain will not interminably run round and round in a circle of
grievances, apprehensions, and fears which no amount of
contemplation can destroy or even ameliorate.
The brain, the brain--that is the seat of trouble! 'Well,' you say, 'of
course it is. We all know that!' We don't act as if we did, anyway. 'Give
us more brains, Lord!' ejaculated a great writer. Personally, I think he
would have been wiser if he had asked first for the power to keep in
order such brains as we have. We indubitably possess quite enough
brains, quite as much as we can handle. The supreme muddlers of
living are often people of quite remarkable intellectual faculty, with a
quite remarkable gift of being wise for others. The pity is that our
brains have a way of 'wandering,' as it is politely called.
Brain-wandering is indeed now recognised as a specific disease. I
wonder what you, O business man with an office in Ludgate Circus,
would say to your office-boy, whom you had dispatched on an urgent

message to Westminster, and whom you found larking around Euston
Station when you rushed to catch your week-end train. 'Please, sir, I
started to go to Westminster, but there's something funny in my limbs
that makes me go up all manner of streets. I can't help it, sir!' 'Can't
you?' you would say. 'Well, you had better go and be somebody else's
office-boy.' Your brain is something worse than that office-boy,
something more insidiously potent for evil.
I conceive