The supreme muddlers of living are often people of quite remarkable intellectual faculty, with a quite remarkable gift of being wise for others.  The pity is that our brains have a way of ‘wandering,’ as it is politely called.  Brain-wandering is indeed now recognised as a specific disease.  I wonder what you, O business man with an office in Ludgate Circus, would say to your office-boy, whom you had dispatched on an urgent message to Westminster, and whom you found larking around Euston Station when you rushed to catch your week-end train.  ’Please, sir, I started to go to Westminster, but there’s something funny in my limbs that makes me go up all manner of streets.  I can’t help it, sir!’ ‘Can’t you?’ you would say.  ‘Well, you had better go and be somebody else’s office-boy.’  Your brain is something worse than that office-boy, something more insidiously potent for evil.

I conceive the brain of the average well-intentioned man as possessing the tricks and manners of one of those gentlemen-at-large who, having nothing very urgent to do, stroll along and offer their services gratis to some shorthanded work of philanthropy.  They will commonly demoralise and disorganise the business conduct of an affair in about a fortnight.  They come when they like; they go when they like.  Sometimes they are exceedingly industrious and obedient, but then there is an even chance that they will shirk and follow their own sweet will.  And they mustn’t be spoken to, or pulled up—­for have they not kindly volunteered, and are they not giving their days for naught!  These persons are the bane of the enterprises in which they condescend to meddle.  Now, there is a vast deal too much of the gentleman-at-large about one’s brain.  One’s brain has no right whatever to behave as a gentleman-at-large:  but it in fact does.  It forgets; it flatly ignores orders; at the critical moment when pressure is highest, it simply lights a cigarette and goes out for a walk.  And we meekly sit down under this behaviour!  ’I didn’t feel like stewing,’ says the young man who, against his wish, will fail in his examination.  ‘The words were out of my mouth before I knew it,’ says the husband whose wife is a woman.  ‘I couldn’t get any inspiration to-day,’ says the artist.  ‘I can’t resist Stilton,’ says the fellow who is dying of greed.  ‘One can’t help one’s thoughts,’ says the old worrier.  And this last really voices the secret excuse of all five.

And you all say to me:  ’My brain is myself.  How can I alter myself?  I was born like that.’  In the first place you were not born ‘like that,’ you have lapsed to that.  And in the second place your brain is not yourself.  It is only a part of yourself, and not the highest seat of authority.  Do you love your mother, wife, or children with your brain?  Do you desire with your brain?  Do you, in a word, ultimately and essentially live with your brain?  No.  Your brain is an instrument.  The proof that it is an instrument lies in the fact