practise medicine in quite a new way." We may also recall the
consultation between M. de Pourceaugnac's two doctors: "The
arguments you have used are so erudite and elegant that it is
impossible for the patient not to be hypochondriacally melancholic;
or, 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