will admit all the shortcomings of existence, will face them like a man, grimly, sourly, in a sturdy despair.  He will mutter:  ’Of course I’m angry!  Who wouldn’t be?  Of course I’m disappointed!  Did I expect this twenty years ago?  Yes, we ought to save more.  But we don’t, so there you are!  I’m bound to worry!  I know I should be better if I didn’t smoke so much.  I know there’s absolutely no sense at all in taking liqueurs.  Absurd to be ruffled with her when she’s in one of her moods.  I don’t have enough exercise.  Can’t be regular, somehow.  Not the slightest use hoping that things will be different, because I know they won’t.  Queer world!  Never really what you may call happy, you know.  Now, if things were different ...’  He loses consciousness.

Observe:  he has taken himself for granted, just glancing at his faults and looking away again.  It is his environment that has occupied his attention, and his environment—­’things’—­that he would wish to have ‘different,’ did he not know, out of the fulness of experience, that it is futile to desire such a change?  What he wants is a pipe that won’t put itself into his mouth, a glass that won’t leap of its own accord to his lips, money that won’t slip untouched out of his pocket, legs that without asking will carry him certain miles every day in the open air, habits that practise themselves, a wife that will expand and contract according to his humours, like a Wernicke bookcase, always complete but never finished.  Wise man, he perceives at once that he can’t have these things.  And so he resigns himself to the universe, and settles down to a permanent, restrained discontent.  No one shall say he is unreasonable.

You see, he has given no attention to the machine.  Let us not call it a flying-machine.  Let us call it simply an automobile.  There it is on the road, jolting, screeching, rattling, perfuming.  And there he is, saying:  ’This road ought to be as smooth as velvet.  That hill in front is ridiculous, and the descent on the other side positively dangerous.  And it’s all turns—­I can’t see a hundred yards in front.’  He has a wild idea of trying to force the County Council to sand-paper the road, or of employing the new Territorial Army to remove the hill.  But he dismisses that idea—­he is so reasonable.  He accepts all.  He sits clothed in reasonableness on the machine, and accepts all.  ‘Ass!’ you exclaim.  ’Why doesn’t he get down and inflate that tyre, for one thing?  Anyone can see the sparking apparatus is wrong, and it’s perfectly certain the gear-box wants oil.

Why doesn’t he—?’ I will tell you why he doesn’t.  Just because he isn’t aware that he is on a machine at all.  He has never examined what he is on.  And at the back of his consciousness is a dim idea that he is perched on a piece of solid, immutable rock that runs on castors.

II

AMATEURS IN THE ART OF LIVING