The influences about him create his preferences, his aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He creates none of these things for himself." Poor Mark Twain! That is the way of common flesh. But only the great spirit so fully apprehends the tragedy of it. Nothing, consequently, could be more pathetic than the picture Mark Twain draws, in "What Is Man?" and in his later memoranda, of the human mind. It is really his own mind he is describing, and one cannot imagine anything more unlike the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a single flood, all poise, all natural control. "You cannot keep your mind from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.... The mind carries on thought on its own hook.... We are automatic machines which act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All day long our machinery is doing things from habit and instinct, and without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9 thinking apparatus".... Man "has habits, and his habits will act before his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers." Mark Twain cannot even conceive of the individual reacting, as the mature man, as the artist preeminently, does, upon his instinctive life and controlling it for his own ends. He shows us the works of his mental machine "racing along from subject to subject--a drifting panorama of ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any help from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name the multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen minutes." The mind?--man "has no control over it; it does as it pleases. It will take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him. It is entirely independent of him." Does he call himself a machine? He might better have said a merry-go-round, without the rhythm of a merry-go-round. Mark Twain reveals himself in old age as a prey to all manner of tumbling, chaotic obsessions; his mind rings with rhymes he cannot banish, sticks and stumbles over chess-problems he has no desire to solve: "it wouldn't listen; it played right along. It wore me out and I got up haggard and wretched in the morning." A swarming mass of dissociated fragments of personality, an utterly disintegrated spirit, a spirit that has lost, that has never possessed, the principle of its own growth. Always, in these speculations, however, we find two major personalities at war with each other. One is the refractory self that wants to publish the book regardless of consequences; the other is the "insolent absolute Monarch inside of a man who is the man's master" and who forbids it. The eternal conflict of Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Polly playing itself out to the end in the theater of Mark Twain's soul!