ained.
Perhaps things looked worse than they were; that was some consolation.

XVI. OF THE ARTIFICIAL IN MAN, AND OF THE ZEITGEIST

You have seen these two young people--Bechamel, by-the-bye, is the man's
name, and the girl's is Jessie Milton--from the outside; you have heard
them talking; they ride now side by side (but not too close together,
and in an uneasy silence) towards Haslemere; and this chapter will
concern itself with those curious little council chambers inside their
skulls, where their motives are in session and their acts are considered
and passed.

But first a word concerning wigs and false teeth. Some jester, enlarging
upon the increase of bald heads and purblind people, has deduced a
wonderful future for the children of men. Man, he said, was nowadays
a hairless creature by forty or fifty, and for hair we gave him a wig;
shrivelled, and we padded him; toothless, and lo! false teeth set in
gold. Did he lose a limb, and a fine, new, artificial one was at his
disposal; get indigestion, and to hand was artificial digestive fluid
or bile or pancreatine, as the case might be. Complexions, too,
were replaceable, spectacles superseded an inefficient eye-lens, and
imperceptible false diaphragms were thrust into the failing ear. So
he went over our anatomies, until, at last, he had conjured up a weird
thing of shreds and patches, a simulacrum, an artificial body of a
man, with but a doubtful germ of living flesh lurking somewhere in his
recesses. To that, he held, we were coming.

How far such odd substitution for the body is possible need not concern
us now. But the devil, speaking by the lips of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, hath
it that in the case of one Tomlinson, the thing, so far as the soul is
concerned, has already been accomplished. Time was when men had
simple souls, desires as natural as their eyes, a little reasonable
philanthropy, a little reasonable philoprogenitiveness, hunger, and a
taste for good living, a decent, personal vanity, a healthy, satisfying
pugnacity, and so forth. But now we are taught and disciplined for
years and years, and thereafter we read and read for all the time some
strenuous, nerve-destroying business permits. Pedagogic hypnotists,
pulpit and platform hypnotists, book-writing hypnotists,
newspaper-writing hypnotists, are at us all. This sugar you are eating,
they tell us, is ink, and forthwith we reject it with infinite disgust.
This black draught of unrequited toil is T