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 amœba 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.
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 amœba. It is itself _quâ_ maker of the stomach and being fed; it is not itself _quâ_ stomach and _quâ_ 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 amœba is man is also; man is only a great many amœbas, 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 amœbas 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.