Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net _Are the Spirit and the Flesh one and the same thing? Or are they separate entities, dependent and at the same time independent of each other? Perhaps some great Cosmic Law holds this secret. But the one Universal Element that we can depend upon, apparently, is The Lucky Accident._ cogito, ergo sum _by ... John Foster West_ A warped instant in Space--and two egos are separated from their bodies and lost in a lonely abyss. I think, therefore I am. That was the first thought I had. Of course not in the same symbols, but with the same meaning. I awakened, or came alive, or came into existence suddenly, at least my mental consciousness did. "Here am I," I thought, "but what am I, why am I, where am I?" I had nothing to work with except pure reason. I was _there_ because I was not somewhere else. I was certain I was _there_ and that was the extent of my knowledge at the moment. I looked about me--no, I _reasoned_ about me. I was surrounded by nothingness, by black nothingness, a vacuum. Immense distances away I could detect light; or rather, I could perceive waves of force passing around me which originated at points vast distances away, vast in relation to my position in the nothingness. There were waves of force all about me, varying in frequency. The nothingness was alive with waves of force, traveling parallel and tangential to each other without seeming to interfere one with another. I measured them, differentiated between them and finished with the task in a matter of seconds. How could I do it? It was one of the capabilities I was _created_ with. What was I? I perceived the waves of force. I perceived great quantities of mass--solid, liquid, gas--whirling in vacuum, mass built up out of patterns of basic force. I searched my own being, analyzed myself. I was not gas. I was not solid. I was not even force. Yet I existed. I could reason. I was a beginning, a sudden beginning. And I had duration because I knew that time had elapsed since the moment I _awakened_ though I had no means of telling how much time or of even naming the period. * * * * * Could I really be _pure reason_? Can reason exist? Can rational entity exist without a groundwork of matter, or at least of force? It could. It must. I was rational entity and I existed. Yet I could find nothing of force, nothing to occupy space about my _self_. For all I could ascertain, I might have covered a one-dimensional point in eternity or I might have been spread throughout vast distances. From this reasoning I concluded that rational entity might occur either as some force unlike that of all natural phenomena in space, or as some combination of these forces at the moment beyond my own power to analyze, even detect. I finished with that for the time being.