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 it is at any rate a prophesying 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 versa, 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 accurate; 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 supposed 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 amoeba 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.