even if he were not, he must surely become so because of the elegance of the things you have said and the accuracy of your reasoning.”  We might multiply examples, for all we need do would be to call up Moliere’s doctors, one after the other.  However far, moreover, comic fancy may seem to go, reality at times undertakes to improve upon it.  It was suggested to a contemporary philosopher, an out-and-out arguer, that his arguments, though irreproachable in their deductions, had experience against them.  He put an end to the discussion by merely remarking, “Experience is in the wrong.”  The truth is, this idea of regulating life as a matter of business routine is more widespread than might be imagined; it is natural in its way, although we have just obtained it by an artificial process of reconstruction.  One might say that it gives us the very quintessence of pedantry, which, at bottom, is nothing else than art pretending to outdo nature.

To sum up, then, we have one and the same effect, which assumes ever subtler forms as it passes from the idea of an artificial mechanisation of the human body, if such an expression is permissible, to that of any substitution whatsoever of the artificial for the natural.  A less and less rigorous logic, that more and more resembles the logic of dreamland, transfers the same relationship into higher and higher spheres, between increasingly immaterial terms, till in the end we find a mere administrative enactment occupying the same relation to a natural or moral law that a ready-made garment, for instance, does to the living body.  We have now gone right to the end of the first of the three directions we had to follow.  Let us turn to the second and see where it will lead us.

2.  Our starting-point is again “something mechanical encrusted upon the living.”  Where did the comic come from in this case?  It came from the fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine.  Accordingly, it seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work.  But this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body.  It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass.  When we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and, in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle of intellectual and moral life, Let us suppose, however, that our attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from sharing in the lightness and subtlety of the principle with which it is animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft.  Then the body will become to the soul what, as we have just