When I put forward my opinion that the aspect of life, and the forms that surrounds us, _might_, perchance--without too great sacrifice on the part of the painter, without too great a disturbance for our dear conservatisms and delicate obstructionisms--be modified, I start from Buddha rather than from Lipton, Maximilian Harden or Madame Tussaud. But I start from Buddha with so much of the Fashion and spirit of our time as he would have developed living in our midst to-day; familiar with and delighting in the pleasant inventions and local colour of our age; drinking Buchanan’s Scotch whisky with relish, smoking Three Nuns; familiar with the smell of Harris tweeds, Euthymol, and the hot pestiferous Tube wind. I do not recommend any abstraction of our mental structure, or more definite unclothing than to strip till we come to the energetic lines required. So we have visualised a respectable and legendary figure, appreciating Dunhill or Dubec tobacco, with no aversion to seeing Mae Marsh, or paying homage to that uncanny piece of meat flinging itself indignantly about nightly under the hungry nose of the Monster of Mirth, the sturdy and priceless ape, George Robey. Supposing that we destroyed every vestige of animal and insect life on this planet, and substituted machines of our invention, under immediate human control, for this mass of mechanisms that we had wiped out, what would be the guiding principle of these new masses? The same as at present, the wild animal and insect forms? Would we domesticate the universe, and make it an immense hive working for our will, scavenging, honey-making, fetching and carrying for man; or what? It is not a bird-like act for a man to set himself coldly to solve the riddle of the bird and understand it; as it is human to humanise it. So we do not wish to become a vulture or a swallow. We want to enjoy our consciousness, but to enjoy it in all forms of life, and use all modes and processes for our satisfaction. Having said _all_ forms, we get back once more to the indiscriminate, mechanical and unprogressive world that we first considered. Only now we have substituted, in fancy, an approximate human invention for every form of animate life. It is evidently not this hungry, frigid and devouring existence of the scorpion, the wild cat or the eagle that we are disposed to perpetuate. Every living form is a miraculous mechanism, however, and every sanguinary, vicious or twisted need produces in Nature’s workshop a series of mechanical arrangements extremely suggestive and interesting for the engineer, and almost invariably beautiful or interesting for the artist. The Marinetti rant around machinery is really, at bottom, adulation for the universe of beings, and especially the world of insects.