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 amœba 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. 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 amœba 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. Being,
above all things, a logical thinker, and abhorring the contradiction in
terms involved in admitting anything to be both itself and something
other than itself at one and the same time, he makes the manner in which
the one is rooted into the other a pretext for merging the ego, as the
less bulky of the two, in the non-ego; hence practically he declares the
ego to have no further existence, except as a mere appendage and adjunct
of the non-ego the existence of which he alone recognises (though how he
can recognise it without recognising also that he is recognising it as
something foreign to himself it is not easy to see). As for the action
and interaction that goes on in the non-ego, he refers it to fate,
fortune, chance, luck, necessity, immutable law, providence (meaning
generally improvidence) or to whatever kindred term he has most fancy
for. In other words, he is so much impressed with the connection between
luck and cunning, and so anxious to avoid contradiction in terms, that he
tries to abolish cunning, and dwells, as Mr. Darwin did, almost
exclusively upon the luck side of the matter.
Others, on the other hand, find the ego no less striking than their
opponents find the non-ego. Every hour they mould things so considerably
to their pleasure that, even though they may for argument’s sake admit
free-will to be an illusion, they say with reason that no reality can be
more real than an illusion which is so strong, so persistent and so
universal; this contention, indeed, cannot be disputed except at the cost
of invalidating the reality of all even our most assured convictions.
They admit that there is an apparent connection between their ego and
non-ego, their necessity and free-will, their luck and cunning; they
grant that the difference is resolvable into a difference of degree and
not of kind; but, on the other hand, they say that in each degree there
still lurks a little kind, and that a difference of many degrees makes a
difference of kind—there being, in fact, no difference between
differences of degree and those of kind, except that the second are an
accumulation of the first. The all-powerfulness of the surroundings is
declared by them to be as completely an illusion, if examined closely, as
the power of the individual was declared to be by their opponents,
inasmuch as the antecedents of the non-ego, when examined by them, prove
to be not less due to the personal individual element everywhere
recognisable, than the ego, when examined by their opponents, proved to
be mergeable in the universal. They claim, therefore, to be able to
resolve everything into spontaneity and free-will with no less logical
consistency than that with which freewill can be resolved into an outcome
of necessity.