You will not deny that I have educated myself and made many friends. _Conscience_. Friends! your nature is very adaptable--you interest yourself in their pursuits, and so deceive them into a false estimate of your worth. Your education--speak not of it; it is but flimsy stuff. _I_. There I join issue with you. Have I not drawn the intense ego out of the clouds of semi-consciousness, and realised it? And surely, the rescue and the individualisation of the ego is the first step. _Conscience_, To what end? You have nothing to teach, nothing to reveal. I have often thought of asking you this: since death is the only good, why do you not embrace death? Of all the world's goods it is the cheapest, and the most easily obtained. _I_. We must live since nature has willed it so. My poor conscience, are you still struggling in the fallacy of free will? For at least a hundred thousand years man has rendered this planet abominable and ridiculous with what he is pleased to call his intelligence, without, however, having learned that his life is merely the breaking of the peace of unconsciousness, the drowsy uplifting of tired eyelids of somnolent nature. How glibly this loquacious ape chatters of his religion and his moral sense, always failing to see that both are but allurements and inveiglements! With religion he is induced to bear his misery, and his sexual appetite is preserved, ignorant, and vigorous, by means of morals. A scorpion, surrounded by a ring of fire, will sting itself to death, and man would turn upon life and deny it, if his reason were complete. Religion and morals are the poker and tongs with which nature intervenes and scatters the ring of reason. _Conscience_ (after a long pause). I believe--forgive my ignorance, but I have seen so little of you this long while--that your boast is that no woman influenced, changed, or modified your views of life. _I_.