Property and Common Sense 117 
whichever way the fact is stated the result is the same; 
and if simplicity of statement be regarded, there is no more 
convenient way of putting the matter than to say that 
though luck is mighty, cunning is mightier still. Organism 
commonly shows its cunning by practising what Horace 
preached, and treating itself as more plastic than its 
surroundings ; those indeed who have had the greatest 
reputation as moulders of circumstances have ever been 
the first to admit that they had gained their ends more by 
shaping their actions and themselves to suit events, than 
by trying to shape events to suit themselves and their 
actions. Modification, like charity, begins at home. 
But however this may be, there can be no doubt that 
cunning is in the long run mightier than luck as regards 
the acquisition of property, and what applies to property 
applies to organism also. Property, as I have lately seen 
was said by Rosmini, is a kind of extension of the personality 
into the outside world. He might have said as truly that 
it is a kind of penetration of the outside world within the 
limits of the personality, or that itis at any rate a prophesy- 
ing of, and essay after, the more living phase of matter in 
the direction of which it is tending. If approached from the 
dynamical or living side of the underlying substratum, it is 
the beginning of the comparatively stable equilibrium 
which we call brute matter ; if from the statical side, that 
is to say, from that of brute matter, it is the beginning of 
that dynamical state which we associate with life ; it is the 
last of ego and first of non ego, or vice versd, as the case may 
be ; it is the ground whereon the two meet and are neither 
wholly one nor wholly the other, but a whirling mass of 
contradictions such as attends all fusion. 
What property is to a man’s mind or soul that his body 
is also, only more so. The body is property carried to the 
bitter end, or property is the body carried to the bitter end, 
whichever the reader chooses; the expression “ organic 
wealth ” is not figurative ; none other is so apt and accur- 
