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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were replaceable, spectacles superseded an inefficient eye-lens, and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
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