THE ATTEMPT TO ELIMINATE MIND. 155 



is tlie other. Between these two views the slaves of 

 logic have oscillated for centuries, and to all appear- 

 ance will continue to oscillate for centuries more. 



People who think — as against those who feel and 

 act — ^want hard and fast lines — without which, indeed, 

 they cannot think at all ; these lines are as it were 

 steps cut on a slope of ice without which there would 

 be no descending it. When we have begun to travel 

 the downward path of thought, we ask ourselves ques- 

 tions about life and death, ego and non ego, object and 

 subject, necessity and free will, and other kindred 

 subjects. We want to know where we are, and in 

 the hope of simplifying matters, strip, as it were, each 

 subject to the skin, and finding that even this has not 

 ireed it from all extraneous matter, flay it alive in the 

 hope that if we grub down deep enough we shall come 

 upon it in its pure unalloyed state free from all incon- 

 venient complication through intermixture with any- 

 thing alien to itself. Then, indeed, we can docket it, 

 and pigeon-hole it for what it is ; but what can we do 

 with it tiU we have got it pure ? We want to account 

 for things, which means that we want to know to which 

 of the various accounts opened in our mental ledger 

 we ought to carry them — and how can we do this if 

 we admit a phenomenon to be neither one thing nor 

 the other, but to belong to half-a-dozen different 

 accounts in proportions which often cannot even 

 approximately be determined ? If we are to keep 

 accounts we must keep them in reasonable compass ; 

 and if keeping them within reasonable compass 

 involves something o'f a Procrustean arrangement, we 



