define the soul.
You might as well ask a bicycle to define the young damsel who so
whimsically and so god-like pedals her way along the highroad. A young
lady skeltering off on her bicycle to meet her young man--why, what
could the bicycle make of such a mystery, if you explained it till
doomsday. Yet the bicycle wouldn't be spinning from Streatham to
Croydon by itself.

So we may as well settle down to the little god in the machine. We may
as well call it the individual soul, and leave it there. It's as far
as the bicycle would ever get, if it had to define Mademoiselle. But
be sure the bicycle would not deny the existence of the young miss who
seats herself in the saddle. Not like us, who try to pretend there is
no one in the saddle. Why even the sun would no more spin without a
rider than would a cycle-pedal. But, since we have innumerable planets
to reckon with, in the spinning we must not begin to define the rider
in terms of our own exclusive planet. Nevertheless, rider there is:
even a rider of the many-wheeled universe.

But let us leave the universe alone. It is too big a bauble for
me.--_Revenons._--At the start of me there is me. There is a
mysterious little entity which is my individual self, the god who
builds the machine and then makes his gay excursion of seventy years
within it. Now we are talking at the moment about the machine. For the
moment we are the bicycle, and not the feather-brained cyclist. So
that all we can do is to define the cyclist in terms of ourself. A
bicycle could say: Here, upon my leather saddle, rests a strange and
animated force, which I call the force of gravity, as being the one
great force which controls my universe. And yet, on second thoughts, I
must modify myself. This great force of gravity is not _always_ in
the saddle. Sometimes it just is not there--and I lean strangely
against a wall. I have been even known to turn upside down, with my
wheels in the air; spun by the same mysterious Miss. So that I must
introduce a theory of Relativity. However, mostly, when I am awake and
alive, she is in the saddle; or _it_ is in the saddle, the mysterious
force. And when it is in the saddle, then two subsidiary forces plunge
and claw upon my two pedals, plunge and claw with inestimable power.
And at the same time, a kind and mysterious force sways my head-stock,
sways most incalculably, and governs my whole motion. This force is
not a driving force, but a subtle directing force, bene