And this interflow, this electric vibration is polarized. There is a positive and a negative polarity. This is a law of life, of vitalism. Only ideas are final, finite, static, and single. All life-interchange is a polarized communication. A circuit. There are lots of circuits. Male and female, for example, and master and servant. The idea, the IDEA, that fixed gorgon monster, and the IDEAL, that great stationary engine, these two gods-of-the-machine have been busy destroying all _natural_ reciprocity and _natural_ circuits, for centuries. IDEAS have played the very old Harry with sex relationship, that is, with the great circuit of man and woman. Turned the thing into a wheel on which the human being in both is broken. And the IDEAL has mangled the blood-reciprocity of master and servant into an abstract horror. Master and servant--or master and man relationship is, essentially, a polarized flow, like love. It is a circuit of vitalism which flows between master and man and forms a very precious nourishment to each, and keeps both in a state of subtle, quivering, vital equilibrium. Deny it as you like, it is so. But once you _abstract_ both master and man, and make them both serve an idea: production, wage, efficiency, and so on: so that each looks on himself as an instrument performing a certain repeated evolution, then you have changed the vital, quivering circuit of master and man into a mechanical machine unison. Just another way of life: or anti-life. You could never quite do this on a sailing ship. A master had to be master, or it was hell. That is, there had to be this strange interflow of master-and-man, the strange reciprocity of command and obedience. The reciprocity of command and obedience is a state of unstable vital equilibrium. Everything vital, or natural, is unstable, thank God. The ship had been at sea many weeks. A great strain on master and men. An increasing callous indifference in the men, an increasing irritability in the master. And then what? A storm. Don't expect me to say _why_ storms must be. They just are. Storms in the air, storms in the water, storms of thunder, storms of anger. Storms just are. Storms are a sort of violent readjustment in some polarized flow. You have a polarized circuit, a circuit of unstable equilibrium. The instability increases till there is a crash. Everything seems to break down. Thunder roars, lightning flashes. The master roars, the whip whizzes. The sky sends down sweet rain. The ship knows a new strange stillness, a readjustment, a refinding of equilibrium. Ask the Lord Almighty why it is so. I don't know. I know it is so. But flogging? Why flogging? Why not use reason or take away jam for tea? Why not? Why not ask the thunder please to abstain from this physical violence of crashing and thumping, please to swale away like thawing snow. Sometimes the thunder _does_ swale away like thawing snow, and then you hate it. Muggy, sluggish, inert, dreary sky. Flogging.