even the complex things. The false type of naturalness harps
always on the distinction between the natural and the artificial.
The higher kind of naturalness ignores that distinction.
To the child the tree and the lamp-post are as natural and as
artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them are natural
but both supernatural. For both are splendid and unexplained.
The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame with which
Sam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the gold
of fairy-tales. In the middle of the wildest fields the most rustic
child is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. And the only spiritual
or philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men pay
for them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that men
are killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them.
The evil is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain.
The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they
are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical,
but that men are mechanical.

In this matter, then, as in all the other matters treated in this book,
our main conclusion is that it is a fundamental point of view,
a philosophy or religion which is needed, and not any change in habit
or social routine. The things we need most for immediate practical
purposes are all abstractions. We need a right view of the human lot,
a right view of the human society; and if we were living eagerly
and angrily in the enthusiasm of those things, we should,
ipso facto, be living simply in the genuine and spiritual sense.
Desire and danger make every one simple. And to those who talk to us
with interfering eloquence about Jaeger and the pores of the skin,
and about Plasmon and the coats of the stomach, at them shall only
be hurled the words that are hurled at fops and gluttons, "Take no