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 amoeba.  It is itself qua maker of the stomach and being fed; it is not itself qua stomach and qua 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 persons of some of its descendants to reason with sufficient soundness.  And what the amoeba is man is also; man is only a great many amoebas, most of them dreadfully narrow-minded, going up and down the country with their goods and chattels like gipsies in a caravan; he is only a great many amoebas that have had much time and money spent on their education, and received large bequests of organised intelligence from those that have gone before them.

The most incorporate tool—­we will say an eye, or a tooth, or the closed fist when used to strike—­has still something of the non ego about it in so far as it is used; those organs, again, that are the most completely separate from the body, as the locomotive engine, must still from time to time kiss the soil of the human body, and be handled and thus crossed with man again if they would remain in working order.  They cannot be cut adrift from the most living form of matter (I mean most living from our point of view), and remain absolutely without connection with it for any length of time, any more than a seal can live without coming up sometimes to breathe; and in so far as they become linked on to living beings they live.  Everything is living which is in close communion with, and interpermeated by, that something which we call mind or thought.  Giordano Bruno saw this long ago when he made an interlocutor in one of his dialogues say that a man’s hat and cloak are alive when he is wearing them.  “Thy boots and spurs live,” he exclaims, “when thy feet carry them; thy hat lives when thy head is within it; and so the stable lives when it contains the horse or mule, or even yourself;” nor is it easy to see how this is to be refuted except at a cost which no one in his senses will offer.

It may be said that the life of clothes in wear and implements in use is no true life, inasmuch as it differs from flesh and blood life in too many and important respects; that we have made up our minds about not letting life outside the body too decisively to allow the question to be reopened; that if this be tolerated we shall have societies for the prevention of cruelty to chairs and tables, or cutting clothes amiss, or wearing them to tatters, or whatever other absurdity may occur to idle and unkind people; the whole discussion, therefore, should be ordered out of court at once.