It is apparently among the moderately well-to-do, the half-idle classes, that such a revulsion chiefly has its way; leading now and again to fantastic, archaising cults and beliefs and to make-believe credence in occult insights and powers. At the same time, and with the like tincture of affectation and make-believe, there runs through much of the community a feeling of maladjustment and discomfort, that seeks a remedy in a “return to Nature” in one way or another; some sort of a return to “the simple life,” which shall in some fashion afford an escape from the unending “grind” of living from day to day by the machine method and shall so put behind us for a season the burdensome futilities by help of which alone life can be carried on under the routine of the machine process. All this uneasy revulsion may not be taken at its face value; there is doubtless a variable but fairly large element of affectation that comes to expression in all this talk about the simple life; but when all due abatement has been allowed there remains a substantial residue of unaffected protest. The pitch and volume of this protest against “artificial” and “futile” ways of life is greatest in the advanced industrial countries, and it has been growing greater concomitantly with the advance of the machine era. What is perhaps more significant of actualities than these well-bred professions of discomfort and discontent is the “vacation,” being a more tangible phenomenon and statable in quantitative terms. The custom of “taking a vacation” has been on the increase for some time, and the avowed need of a yearly or seasonal holiday greatly exceeds the practice of it in nearly all callings. This growing recourse to vacations should be passably conclusive evidence to the effect that neither the manner of life enforced by the machine system, nor the occupations of those who are in close contact with this technology and its due habits of thought, can be “natural” to the common run of civilised mankind. According to accepted theories of heredity,[143] civilised mankind should by native endowment be best fit to live under conditions of a moderately advanced savagery, such as the machine technology will not permit.[144] Neither in the physical conditions which it imposes, therefore, nor in the habitual ways of observation and reasoning which it requires in the work to be done, is the machine age adapted to the current native endowment of the race. And these various movements of unrest and revulsion are evidence, for as much as they are worth, that such is the case.