and he replied: 'Never mind what's the matter. Just look at my lovely
acetylene lamps, how they shine, and how I've polished them!' You would
not regard him as a Clifford-Earp, or even as an entirely sane man. So
with our student of poetry. It is indubitable that a large amount of
what is known as self-improvement is simply self-indulgence--a form of
pleasure which only incidentally improves a particular part of the
machine, and even that to the neglect of far more important parts.

My aim is to direct a man's attention to himself as a whole, considered
as a machine, complex and capable of quite extraordinary efficiency,
for travelling through this world smoothly, in any desired manner, with
satisfaction not only to himself but to the people he meets _en route_,
and the people who are overtaking him and whom he is overtaking. My aim
is to show that only an inappreciable fraction of our ordered and
sustained efforts is given to the business of actual living, as
distinguished from the preliminaries to living.




III

THE BRAIN AS A GENTLEMAN-AT-LARGE


It is not as if, in this business of daily living, we were seriously
hampered by ignorance either as to the results which we ought to obtain,
or as to the general means which we must employ in order to obtain them.
With all our absorption in the mere preliminaries to living, and all our
carelessness about living itself, we arrive pretty soon at a fairly