118 Luck, or Cunning ? 
ate ; so universally, indeed, is this recognised that the fact 
has found expression in our liturgy, which bids us pray for 
all those who are any wise afflicted ‘‘in mind, body, or 
estate ;’’ no inference, therefore, can be more simple and 
legitimate than the one in accordance with which the laws 
that govern the development of wealth generally are sup- 
posed also to govern the particular form of health and 
wealth which comes most closely home to us—I mean 
that of our bodily implements or organs. What is the 
stomach but a living sack, or purse of untanned leather, 
wherein we keep our means of subsistence ? Food is money 
made easy ; it is petty cash in its handiest and most reduced 
form ; it is our way of assimilating our possessions and 
making them indeed our own. What is the purse but 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 
ameceba does, and exchange it for some other article as 
soon as it has done eating ? How marvellously 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 hopelessness 
of avoiding contradiction in terms—talk of this, and look, in 
passing, at the ameeba. Itisitself gud maker of the stomach 
and being fed; it is not itself gud stomach and qud 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 
