_The Body of Benjamin Franklin Printer Like the Cover of an Old Book Stripped of Its Lettering and Gilding Lies Here Food for Worms. But the Work Shall Not Be Lost For it will, As he Believed, Come Forth Again In a new and Better Edition Revised & Corrected By The Author._ When he caught me admiring it Tyss laughed. “Felicitous, isnt it, Hodgins? But a lie, a perverse and probably hypocritical lie. There is no Author; the book of life is simply a mess of pied type, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There is no plan, no synopsis to be filled in with pious hopes or sanctimonious actions. There is nothing but a vast emptiness in the universe.” “The other day you told me we admired the devil for rebelling against a plan.” He grinned. “So you expect consistency instead of truth from me, Hodgins. There is no plan, authored by a Mind; it is this no-plan against which Lucifer fought. But there is a plan too, a mindless plan, which accounts for all our acts.” I had been reading an obscure Irish theologian, a Protestant curate of some forsaken parish, so ill-esteemed he had been forced to publish his sermons himself, named George B Shaw, and I had been impressed by his forceful style. I quoted him to Tyss, perhaps as much to preen myself as to counter his argument. “Nonsense. Ive seen the good parson’s book with its eighteenth-century logic and its quaint rationalism, and know it for a waste of ink and paper. Man does not think; he only thinks he thinks. An automaton, he responds to external stimuli; he cannot order his thought.” “You mean that there’s no free will? Not even a marginal minimum of choice?” “Exactly. The whole thing is an illusion. We do what we do because someone else has done what he did; he did it because still another someone did what he did. Every action is the rigid result of another action.” “But there must have been a beginning,” I objected. “And if there was a beginning, choice existed if only for that split second. And if choice exists once it can exist again.”