Our primary affective centers, our centers of spontaneous being, are so utterly ground round and automatized that they squeak in all stages of disharmony and incipient collapse.

We are a people--and not we alone--of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't even know we are raving.
And all is due, directly and solely, to that hateful germ we call the Ideal.

The Ideal is _always_ evil, no matter what ideal it be.

No idea should ever be raised to a governing throne.
This does not mean that man should immediately cut off his head and try to develop a pair of eyes in his breasts.

But it does mean this: that an idea is just the final concrete or registered result of living dynamic interchange and reactions: that no idea is ever perfectly expressed until its dynamic cause is finished; and that to continue to put into dynamic effect an already perfected idea means the nullification of all living activity, the substitution of mechanism, and all the resultant horrors of _ennui_, ecstasy, neurasthenia, and a collapsing psyche.
The whole tree of our idea of life and living is dead.