orthodox and unorthodox alike, in artificial wigs, spouted in unison in
this regard; partly it is the half instinctive tactics of the lax and
lazy-minded to evade trouble and austerities. The incompetent medical
practitioner, incapable of regimen, repeats this cant even to-day,
though he knows full well that, left to Nature, men over-eat themselves
almost as readily as dogs, contract a thousand diseases and exhaust
their last vitality at fifty, and that half the white women in the
world would die with their first children still unborn. He knows, too,
that to the details of such precautionary measures as vaccination, for
example, instinct is strongly opposed, and that drainage and filterage
and the use of soap in washing are manifestly unnatural things. That
large, naked, virtuous, pink, Natural Man, drinking pure spring water,
eating the fruits of the earth, and living to ninety in the open air is
a fantasy; he never was nor will be. The real savage is a nest of
parasites within and without, he smells, he rots, he starves. Forty is
a great age for him. He is as full of artifice as his civilized
brother, only not so wise. As for his moral integrity, let the curious
inquirer seek an account of the Tasmanian, or the Australian, or the
Polynesian before "sophistication" came.

The very existence and nature of man is an interference with Nature and
Nature's ways, using Nature in this sense of the repudiation of
expedients. Man is the tool-using animal, the word-using animal, the
animal of artifice and reason, and the only possible "return to Nature"
for him--if we scrutinize the phrase--would be a return to the
scratching, promiscuous, arboreal simian. To rebel against instinct, to
rebel against limitation, to evade, to trip up, and at last to close
with and grapple and conquer the forces that dominate him, is the
fundamental being of man. And from the very outset of his existence,
from the instant of his birth, if the best possible thing is to be made