Life, he urged, lies not in bodily organs, but in the power to use them,
and in the use that is made of them--that is to say, in the work they do.
As the essence of a factory is not in the building wherein the work is
done, nor yet in the implements used in turning it out, but in the will-
power of the master and in the goods he makes; so the true life of a man
is in his will and work, not in his body. "Those," he argued, "who make
the life of a man reside within his body, are like one who should mistake
the carpenter's tool-box for the carpenter."
He maintained that this had been my father's teaching, for which my
father heartily trusts that he may be forgiven.
He went on to say that our will-power is not wholly limited to the
working of its own special system of organs, but under certain conditions
can work and be worked upon by other will-powers like itself: so that if,
for example, A's will-power has got such hold on B's as to be able,
through B, to work B's mechanism, what seems to have been B's action will
in reality have been more A's than B's, and this in the same real sense
as though the physical action had been effected through A's own
mechanical system--A, in fact, will have been living in B. The
universally admitted maxim that he who does this or that by the hand of
an agent does it himself, shews that the foregoing view is only a
roundabout way of stating what common sense treats as a matter of course.
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