When we consider how little we have to do with our parentage, country and education, or even with our genus and species, how vitally these things affect us both in life and death, and how, practically, the cunning in connection with them is so spent as to be no cunning at all, it is plain that the drifts, currents, and storms of what is virtually luck will be often more than the little helm of cunning can control. And so with death. Nothing can affect us less, but at the same time nothing can affect us more; and how little can cunning do against it? At the best it can only defer it. Cunning is nine-tenths luck, and luck is nine-tenths cunning; but the fact that nine-tenths of cunning is luck leaves still a tenth part unaccounted for. Choice Our choice is apparently most free, and we are least obviously driven to determine our course, in those cases where the future is most obscure, that is, when the balance of advantage appears most doubtful. Where we have an opinion that assures us promptly which way the balance of advantage will incline—whether it be an instinctive, hereditarily acquired opinion or one rapidly and decisively formed as the result of post-natal experience—then our action is determined at once by that opinion, and freedom of choice practically vanishes. Ego and Non-Ego You can have all ego, or all non-ego, but in theory you cannot have half one and half the other—yet in practice this is exactly what you must have, for everything is both itself and not itself at one and the same time. A living thing is itself in so far as it has wants and gratifies them. It is not itself in so far as it uses itself as a tool for the gratifying of its wants. Thus an amœba is aware of a piece of meat which it wants to eat. It has nothing except its own body to fling at the meat and catch it with. If it had a little hand-net, or even such an organ as our own hand, it would use it, but it has only got itself; so it takes itself by the scruff of its own neck, as it were, and flings itself at the piece of meat, as though it were not itself but something which it is using in order to gratify itself. So we make our own bodies into carriages every time we walk. Our body is our tool-box—and our bodily organs are the simplest tools we can catch hold of. When the amœba has got the piece of meat and has done digesting it, it leaves off being not itself and becomes itself again. A thing is only itself when it is doing nothing; as long as it is doing something it is its own tool and not itself.