Good! But why, if reason can turn knowledge into power, go to Houdini for magic? Turning knowledge into power is real magic, glorious, white and true. It happens every day. Even Dorsey can lead us to the eternal verities, it seems. But he will not permit us long to remain even in their neighborhood. “We learn to think logically,” he declares, “just as we learn to speak correctly or to behave decently. I may think well, I may shave well ... who shall say? My way of thinking and my way of shaving are my own ways.... I may change both tomorrow; someone is always inventing new ways of adjustment, new ways of exciting human protoplasm to change its shaving soap. New thought also. Why not? We have new books, new scandals, new elements, new diseases, new razors, new glands, new logic.”[151] “The point is that there is no thought without muscular or glandular activity. This is true whether the stomach thinks hunger, the dreamer thinks air-castles, the prisoner thinks freedom, or the maiden thinks of her lover. Thinking is a bodily act as coughing or scratching one’s head. During thinking energy is consumed, mechanism is involved.”[152] Do you comprehend? The man who scratches his head has always been supposed to be thinking. Now we know that the scratching is the thinking--thinking is a bodily act. The rumbling of the bowels is thinking. The stomach thinks. Everything thinks but ourselves. No wonder we have new thoughts when so many new thinkers come forward. New logic. My stomach may think that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to twenty-three right angles, or that a bite of mince pie is bigger than the whole pie. It is _my_ stomach. What it thinks is nobody’s business. And by tomorrow my stomach’s protoplasm may become so excited that it will think some other way. I can see how we have new scandals at the same time that we have new books. But I don’t see how we are going to get back merely to the stone age by our new ways of thinking. They will certainly take us back much further than that. And I wonder what our physicians will say to the suggestion that our glands are new? They have been offered to us as new discoveries, but this Dorsey seems to hint that they may be new inventions. I “think” we might better have gone to see Houdini after all. For “rational conduct is a dream” on page 470, and on page 455 it is the only way of converting knowledge into power. Over this mystery I scratch my head in vain. Then there is the Church. “As a projector of unsocial behavior,” says Dorsey, “the so-called Christian Church, with its endless squabbles over forms, creeds and rituals, and its eternal betrayal of humanity, is not far behind.”[153] Not far behind what? Good form. For “good form is in the saddle; it is ruthless, it is mighty, and it does prevail. It is not founded on intelligence.”