PROPERTY AND COMMON SENSE. 129 



made easy ; it is petty cash in its handiest and most 

 reduced form ; it is our way of assimilating our pos-> 

 sessions and making them indeed our own. What is 

 the purse hut a kind of abridged extra corporeal 

 stomach wherein we keep the money which we convert 

 by purchase into food, as we presently convert the 

 food by digestion into flesh and blood ? And what 

 living form is there which is without a purse or 

 stomach, even though it have to job it by the meal 

 as the amoeba does, and exchange it for some other 

 article as soon as it has done eating ? How marvel- 

 lously does the analogy hold between the purse and 

 the stomach alike as. regards form and function ; and 

 I may say in passing that, as usual, the organ which 

 is the more remote from protoplasm is at once more 

 special, more an object of our consciousness, and less 

 an object of its own. 



Talk of ego and non ego meeting, and of the hope- 

 lessness of avoiding contradiction in terms — talk of this, 

 and look, in passing, at the amceba. It is itse\i:qud 

 maker of the stomach and being fed ; it is not itself 

 qud stomach and qiid its using itself as a mere tool or 

 implement to feed itself with. It is active and passive, 

 object and subject, ego and non ego — every kind of Irish 

 bull, in fact, which a sound logician abhors — and it is 

 only because it has persevered, as I said in "Life 

 and Habit," in thus defying logic and arguing most 

 virtuously in a most vicious circle, that it has come 

 in the persons of some of its descendants to reason 

 with sufficient soundness. And what the amceba is 

 man is also ; man is only a great- many amoebas, most 



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