So we
make our own bodies into carriages every time we walk. Our body is
our tool-box--and our bodily organs are the simplest tools we can
catch hold of.
When the amoeba has got the piece of meat and has done digesting it,
it leaves off being not itself and becomes itself again. A thing is
only itself when it is doing nothing; as long as it is doing
something it is its own tool and not itself.
Or you may have it that everything is itself in respect of the
pleasure or pain it is feeling, but not itself in respect of the
using of itself by itself as a tool with which to work its will. Or
perhaps we should say that the ego remains always ego in part; it
does not become all non-ego at one and the same time. We throw our
fist into a man's face as though it were a stick we had picked up to
beat him with. For the moment, our fist is hardly "us," but it
becomes "us" again as we feel the resistance it encounters from the
man's eye. Anyway, we can only chuck about a part of ourselves at a
time, we cannot chuck the lot--and yet I do not know this, for we may
jump off the ground and fling ourselves on to a man.
The fact that both elements are present and are of such nearly equal
value explains the obstinacy of the conflict between the upholders of
Necessity and Free-Will which, indeed, are only luck and cunning
under other names.
For, on the one hand, the surroundings so obviously and powerfully
mould us, body and soul, and even the little modifying power which at
first we seem to have is found, on examination, to spring so
completely from surroundings formerly beyond the control of our
ancestors, that a logical thinker, who starts with these premises, is
soon driven to the total denial of free-will, except, of course, as
an illusion; in other words, he perceives the connection between ego
and non-ego, tries to disunite them so as to know when he is talking
about what, and finds to his surprise that he cannot do so without
violence to one or both.
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