The pleasures of the healthily functioning body are very real pleasures. They constitute a very large proportion of the sum of joy on earth. And nothing can be more obvious than that Nature means them to contribute largely to this sum of joy. To eat with false teeth is not as pleasant as to eat with natural teeth. Artificially to promote either appetite or digestion soon proves but a poor and delusive imitation of Nature’s way. To wear glasses is not as good as to be without them. Neither is the face or the expression of one who always wears glasses as attractive as the face and the expression of one who does not. To a mother, the hand-feeding of her infant child is not the unforgettable experience that breast-feeding is. And, in the deepest and most rapturous transports of love, where a large proportion of the ecstasy depends upon the bodily savouriness and sweetness of the couple involved, natural and normal physiological equipment is of paramount importance. A clean mouth, full of natural teeth, firmly set in unimpaired gums; a clean fresh tongue, not even slightly furred by incipient chronic indigestion; a sweet breath, and the natural fragrance of a healthily functioning body!—who knows love as Nature intended him to know it if he has not known these things? And yet, how many modern men and women ever can know love in this form? How is it possible? Can it be wondered at, therefore, that modern mankind as a whole are beginning to suspect that the _joie de vivre_ is grossly over-rated? Can it be wondered at that the bulk of mankind are beginning to feel that life can well be lived without love? This, then, is the disillusionment that follows on the heels of the values directing our scientific progress. While, through them, we are content to exist despite our defective bodily equipment, we are gradually weaned from our love of life and from our deepest convictions concerning the value of life. For not only does our debilitated or incomplete body itself give us but second-rate joys, but the science that comes to our aid offers us only substitutes, and we are apt to measure the value of life according to those second-rate joys, and according also to the level of happiness attained by means of these substitutes. Thus the values that revile both life and the body in the end succeed in making both life and the body vile.