138 Luck, or Cunning ? 
because I felt angry, and thought I would teach him better 
manners.” Omnipresent life and mind with appearances 
of brute non-livingness—which appearances are deceptive ; 
this is one view. Omnipresent non-livingness or mechanism 
with appearances as though the mechanism were guided 
and controlled by thought—which appearances are decep- 
tive ; this is the other. Between these two views the slaves 
of logic have oscillated for centuries, and to all appearance 
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 questions 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 
freed 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 inconvenient 
complication through intermixture with anything alien 
to itself. Then, indeed, we can docket it, and pigeon-hole 
it for what it is; but what can we do with it till 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 of a 
Procrustean arrangement, we may regret it, but cannot 
help it ; having set up as thinkers we have got to think, and 
