From your chin down you are worth about a dollar and a half a day.
From the chin up you are worth — anything. There’s no limit.
Without your headpiece you are just an animal, and about as valuable as a horse — maybe.
You have a mistaken idea. You think you are paid for your work. You are not. You are paid for what you think while you work. It’s the kind of brain that directs your hands that gives you your rating.
And what causes you the most concern: the contents of your skull, or the mass below the collar-bone?
You exercise your body, keep your arms strong, and your legs limber, and your waistline supple — but do you regularly exercise your cerebrum?
Are your thoughts flabby, uncontrolled, wayward, and useless, though you are expert in tennis or golf ?
Is your thinker as keen, alert, disciplined, accurate, and dependable as your hands?
Where do you get your pleasures? From the chin down? Is it all dancing for your feet, and meat for your belly, and clothes for your back? And — is all your fun in the cellar? Don’t you ever have any fun in the attic?
What interests you most, books or beer?
What pains you most, a stomach-ache or a lie?
How are you pulled? To what part of you is the cable-tow fastened — to your loins or to your forehead?
Suppose it were possible to live after the head had been severed from the body; which part would you rather be, the head part or the meat part?
What are you, anyhow: an animal, pestered with a mind; or a soul, prisoned in a body? Do you know that the gist of culture consists in transferring one’s habitual amusements from below to above the nose?
