A very large part of even quite intelligent conversation has no origination in it and is just made up of phonograph records. You say a thing to a man that calls up Record No. 999873 and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. He just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain that is using his body. With the average man one meets, his body wags his brain when he talks, as a dog wags his tail. The tongue sends its roots not into the brain but into the stomach. (Probably this is why Saint Paul speaks of it so sadly and respectfully as a mighty member--because of its roots.) The main difficulty a man has in having a new brain track, or in being original or plastic in a process of mind is the way his body tries to bully him when he tries it. The body has certain tracks it has got used to in a mind and that it wants to harden the mind down into and then tumtytum along on comfortably and it does not propose--all this blessed meat we carry around on us, to let us think any more than can be helped. I saw some wooden flowers in a florist's window on The Avenue the other day--four or five big blossoms six inches across--real flowers that had been taken from the edge of a volcano in South America--real flowers that had chemically turned to wood--(probably from having gas administered to them by the volcano!)--and I stood there and looked at them thinking how curious it was that spiritual and spirited things like flowers instead of going out and fading away like a spirit, had died into solid wood in that way. Then I turned and walked down the street, watching the souls and bodies of the people and the people were not so different many of them as one looked into their faces, from the wooden flowers, and I could not help seeing, of course, no one can--what their bodies--thousands of them--were apparently doing to their souls. After all the wooden flowers were not really much queerer for flowers than the people--many of them--were for people. From the point of view of the freedom and the plasticity of the human mind, from the point of view of spiritual mastery, of securing new brain tracks in men and women and the consciousness of power, of mobilizing the body and the soul both on the instant for the business of living, it is not a little discouraging after people are twenty-one years old to watch what they are letting their bodies do to them.