planet.  They make long and fatiguing excursions in search of precious materials which all the while are concealed in their own breasts.  They don’t know what they want; they only know that they want something.  Or, if they contrive to settle in their own minds what they do want, a hundred to one the obtaining of it will leave them just as far off contentment as they were at the beginning!  This is a matter of daily observation:  that people are frantically engaged in attempting to get hold of things which, by universal experience, are hideously disappointing to those who have obtained possession of them.  And still the struggle goes on, and probably will go on.  All because brains are lying idle!  ‘It is no trifle that is at stake,’ said Epictetus as to the question of control of instinct by reason. ’It means, Are you in your senses or are you not?’ In this significance, indubitably the vast majority of people are not in their senses; otherwise they would not behave as they do, so vaguely, so happy-go-luckily, so blindly.  But the man whose brain is in working order emphatically is in his senses.

And when a man, by means of the efficiency of his brain, has put his reason in definite command over his instincts, he at once sees things in a truer perspective than was before possible, and therefore he is able to set a just value upon the various parts which go to make up his environment.  If, for instance, he lives in London, and is aware of constant friction, he will be led to examine the claims of London as a Mecca for intelligent persons.  He may say to himself:  ’There is something wrong, and the seat of trouble is not in the machine.  London compels me to tolerate dirt, darkness, ugliness, strain, tedious daily journeyings, and general expensiveness.  What does London give me in exchange?’ And he may decide that, as London offers him nothing special in exchange except the glamour of London and an occasional seat at a good concert or a bad play, he may get a better return for his expenditure of brains, nerves, and money in the provinces.  He may perceive, with a certain French novelist, that ’most people of truly distinguished mind prefer the provinces.’  And he may then actually, in obedience to reason, quit the deceptions of London with a tranquil heart, sure of his diagnosis.  Whereas a man who had not devoted much time to the care of his mental machinery could not screw himself up to the step, partly from lack of resolution, and partly because he had never examined the sources of his unhappiness.  A man who, not having full control of his machine, is consistently dissatisfied with his existence, is like a man who is being secretly poisoned and cannot decide with what or by whom.  And so he has no middle course between absolute starvation and a continuance of poisoning.