Superb energies, passionate patience and ardour, master intellects, were wasted in the long endeavour to find some means by which nature could be conquered and man made master of circumstance--all given fruitlessly; thrown into that bottomless pit of error never to be filled. And these earnest, misguided travellers--so blinded were they--when one of their number turned about in the other direction promptly fell upon him and beat him into submission, as one who would check the struggle towards light and knowledge. Even now that the fact is accepted that nature is to be conquered by her own natural means only, and that supernaturalism is a waste and quaking morass upon which no edifice of truth is to be reared, there are many--sadly many--descendants of Lot's wife casting longing glances back to the Sodom of their intellectual sins. It is nothing to them that having once faced about in the right direction the same amount of effort, properly directed, has achieved that for which the supernaturalists had for ages striven in vain.
Eating his due amount of food and attaching no mystical significance to anything, man tore his way through the heart of mountains, flashed his thoughts under the wastes of ocean, sent his voice across a thousand miles, sailed into the teeth of the wind, devoured space with steam, reared palaces more lofty than Aladdin dreamed of, and--his own Kobold--dived into the darkness and fetched up gold and gems more than the fairy tales ever knew. He made himself lord of the visible earth, of time, of distance, of wave and wind. He laid his hands upon all the forces which had awed his childhood and forced them to work miracles beside which the fables of the Kabbalists seemed tame and feeble. And in spite of this there remain men and women who are more awed by a banjo flying through a dark room than by the telephone; who find the untying of knots in a cabinet, or the clutches of damp hands when the lights are turned down, more important than the automobile. It is the attitude of mind of a child, who is more interested by rabbits coming out of a conjurer's hat than by wireless telegraphy.
There is as great an inequality in the inheritance of health as in the heirship of wealth or brains. Some are born with a fortune of vigour and soundness so large that not a lifetime of eager squandering will leave them poor, and others enter the world paupers of so dire a need that no charity of medicine will ever raise them to comfort; but most of us have just that mediocre legacy of vitality which makes us indistinguishable units in the mass. It lies in the hands of each to improve or waste that property as he chooses, for there are self-made men physically as well as financially, and spendthrifts of health come to as sorrowful an end as prodigals of gold. The body is a realm where a wise ruler brings happiness as surely as a foolish one ensures distress, and wisdom here, as elsewhere, lies in the observance of natural laws.