"] The Triunity of Man 75 



listener at the other end of the wire. The telephone is 

 nothing more than the means of communication of 

 thought ; it is no more and no less alien to the speaker 

 than his voice. So too the hammer and saw, the piano, 

 the pen, and all the other ' tools ' a man uses. For the 

 time they become part of his body. He can think of 

 them as 'others,' just as he can think of his hand or his 

 voice as an ' other.' His hand and his voice are not him- 

 self any more than his pen and his hammer are. He can 

 think of each as 'others.' But the point is that when he 

 is using them he does not so think. As long as they are 

 the means of manifesting his spirit he forgets or dis- 

 regards their otherness. For him, in fact, they are not 

 others just then. As soon as he ceases to use them they 

 may become 'others' again for him. His hand is less 

 likely to be regarded as an ' other ' than the hammer is, 

 because it is less likely to be mislaid, being in more con- 

 stant and intimate relation with him though in passing 

 it may be worth while to remark that the more often 

 anything is used the less likely it is to be mislaid. The 

 capacity for being mislaid is not a bad practical test of 

 the degree in which we regard a thing as an other in 

 ordinary life 1 . A good carpenter never mislays his tools, 

 and we say that his tools are almost a part of himself. 



1 After a discussion of this point late at night with the two 

 people with whom the greater part of this book has been threshed 

 out, one of them dreamed that the whole essence of immanental 

 philosophy could be summed up in a single phrase. That phrase 

 was remembered and noted on waking. It was 'a man does not 

 mislay his only pair of trousers ' ! Could a more apt illustration 

 of the point be found ? Much of interest on the phenomena and 

 meaning of mislaying and forgetting, may be found in Freud's 

 Psychopathology of Every-day Life, though a caveat may perhaps 

 be entered in regard to the metaphysical basis of all Freud's work, 

 since the standpoint adopted is that of a somewhat crude material- 

 istic determinism. 



