'What am I? What is man?' I had looked into a number of books for an answer to this question, before I came on Jeremy Bentham's simple and satisfactory explanation: Man is a mechanism, moved by just so many springs of Action. These springs he enumerates in elaborate tables; and glancing over them this morning before getting up, I began with _Charity_, _All-embracing Benevolence_, _Love of Knowledge_, _Laudable Ambition_, _Godly Zeal_. Then I waited, but there was no sign or buzz of any wheel beginning to move in my inner mechanism. I looked again: I saw _Arrogance_, _Ostentation_, _Vainglory_, _Abomination_, _Rage_, _Fury_, _Revenge_, and I was about to leap from my bed in a paroxysm of passions, when fortunately my eye fell on another set of motives, _Love of Ease_, _Indolence_, _Procrastination_, _Sloth_. IN THE CAGE 'What I say is, what I say!' I vociferate, as a Parrot in the great cage of the World, I hop, screeching, 'What I say is!' from perch to perch. SHRINKAGE Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations; then all the vast life of the Universe is mine. Then again it evaporates, it shrinks, it dwindles; and of all that flood which over-brimmed the bowl of the great Cosmos, there is hardly enough now left to fill a teaspoon. VOICES 'You smoke too much!' whispers the still small voice of Conscience. 'You are a failure, nobody likes you,' Self-contempt keeps muttering. 'What's the good of it all?' sighs Disillusion, arid as a breath from the Sahara. I can't tell you how all these Voices bore me; but I can listen all day with grave attention to that suave bosom-Jesuit who keeps on unweariedly proving that everything I do is done for the public good, and all my acts and appetites and inclinations in the most amazing harmony with Pure Reason and the dictates of the Moral Law. EVANESCENCE How the years pass and life changes, how all things float down the stream of Time and vanish; how friendships fade, and illusions crumble, and hopes dissolve, and solid piece after piece of soap melts away in our hands as we wash them! COMPLACENCY Dove-grey and harmless as a dove, full of piety and innocence and pure thoughts, my Soul brooded unaffectedly within me--I was only half listening to that shrill conversation. And I began to wonder, as more than once in little moments like this of self-esteem I have wondered, whether I might not claim to be something more, after all, than a mere echo or compilation--might not claim in fact to possess a distinct personality of my own. Might it not be worth while, I now asked myself, to follow up this pleasing conjecture, to retire like Descartes from the world, and spend the rest of life, as he spent it, trying to prove my own existence? MY PORTRAIT