thought what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye
shall be clothed. For after all these things do the Gentiles seek.
But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added unto you." Those amazing
words are not only extraordinarily good, practical politics;
they are also superlatively good hygiene. The one supreme way
of making all those processes go right, the processes of health,
and strength, and grace, and beauty, the one and only way of making
certain of their accuracy, is to think about something else.
If a man is bent on climbing into the seventh heaven, he may be
quite easy about the pores of his skin. If he harnesses his waggon
to a star, the process will have a most satisfactory effect upon
the coats of his stomach. For the thing called "taking thought,"
the thing for which the best modern word is "rationalizing,"
is in its nature, inapplicable to all plain and urgent things.
Men take thought and ponder rationalistically, touching remote things--
things that only theoretically matter, such as the transit of Venus.
But only at their peril can men rationalize about so practical
a matter as health.



XI Science and the Savages


A permanent disadvantage of the study of folk-lore and kindred
subjects is that the man of science can hardly be in the nature
of things very frequently a man of the world. He is a student
of nature; he is scarcely ever a student of human nature.
And even where this difficulty is overcome, and he is in some sense