But it is not my design to find fault with this scheme as a matter of medical benefit; if I have ventured to point out some drawbacks, it is only by way of showing that, even from the strictly medical standpoint the cult of uniformity, of standardization, of mechanical perfection, is not free from fault.  But the great objection against that attitude of mind which is typified in the appeal to the analogy of machinery is far more vital.  Our only interest in a machine is that we shall get out of it as much, and as exact, work as possible.  Our interest in our bodies is not so limited.  We may deliberately choose to forego the maximum of mechanical perfection for the sake of living our lives in a way more satisfactory to us than a constant care for that perfection would permit.  Even the most ardent of health enthusiasts—­unless he be an insane fanatic—­draws the line somewhere.  What he forgets is that other people prefer to draw the line somewhere else.  They choose to run a certain amount of risk rather than have their health on their minds.  To compel—­whether by legal means or by social pressure—­every man to take precautions concerning his own body which he deliberately prefers not to take; to make impossible, in this most intimate and personal of all human concerns, the various ways of acting which the infinite varieties of temperament and desire may dictate—­this would be such an invasion of personal liberty, such a suppression of individuality, as would strike us all as appalling, had we not grown so habituated to the mechanical, the statistical, measurement of human values—­to the Flatland view of life.

* * * * *

What gives to these movements that I have been discussing the character which I have been ascribing to them is not so much the specific things which they severally aim to accomplish, but the spirit in which they are carried on, and perhaps still more the spirit, or want of spirit, with which they are met.  It is not that a balance is falsely struck between the benefit of the concrete, circumscribed, measurable improvement aimed at and the injury done to some deeper, more pervading, and quite immeasurable element or principle of life; it is that the balance is not struck at all.  The subtler, the less tangible, element is simply ignored.  It was not always so.  It was not so in the last generation, or the generation before that.  The phenomenon is one that is closely bound up with the ruling tendency of thought and action in all directions; it is not an accident of this or that particular agitation.  Perhaps in no direction is it more convincingly manifested than in the prevailing tone of opinion, or at least of publicly expressed opinion, in regard to the objects and ideals of universities.  That in the present state of the world’s economic and social development on the one hand, and of the various sciences on the other, “service”—­that is, service directly conducive to the general good—­should