Cunning is nine-
tenths luck, and luck is nine-tenths cunning; but the fact that nine-
tenths of cunning is luck leaves still a tenth part unaccounted for.
Choice
Our choice is apparently most free, and we are least obviously driven
to determine our course, in those cases where the future is most
obscure, that is, when the balance of advantage appears most
doubtful.
Where we have an opinion that assures us promptly which way the
balance of advantage will incline--whether it be an instinctive,
hereditarily acquired opinion or one rapidly and decisively formed as
the result of post-natal experience--then our action is determined at
once by that opinion, and freedom of choice practically vanishes.
Ego and Non-Ego
You can have all ego, or all non-ego, but in theory you cannot have
half one and half the other--yet in practice this is exactly what you
must have, for everything is both itself and not itself at one and
the same time.
A living thing is itself in so far as it has wants and gratifies
them. It is not itself in so far as it uses itself as a tool for the
gratifying of its wants. Thus an amoeba is aware of a piece of meat
which it wants to eat. It has nothing except its own body to fling
at the meat and catch it with. If it had a little hand-net, or even
such an organ as our own hand, it would use it, but it has only got
itself; so it takes itself by the scruff of its own neck, as it were,
and flings itself at the piece of meat, as though it were not itself
but something which it is using in order to gratify itself.
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