neration ago, who went back up the
mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his
name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house, and planted
apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable, the
location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the
landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in angora goats to
browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked
Haska's apple trees to death. So I, too, scratch the land with my brief
endeavour and flash my name across a page of legal script ere I pass and
the page grows musty.

"Dreamers and ghosts," the White Logic chuckles.

"But surely the striving was not altogether vain," I contend.

"It was based on illusion and is a lie."

"A vital lie," I retort.

"And pray what is a vital lie but a lie?" the White Logic challenges.
"Come. Fill your glass and let us examine these vital liars who crowd
your bookshelves. Let us dabble in William James a bit."

"A man of health," I say. "From him we may expect no philosopher's
stone, but at least we will find a few robust tonic things to which to
tie."

"Rationality gelded to sentiment," the White Logic grins. "At the end of
all his thinking he still clung to the sentiment of immortality. Facts
transmuted in the alembic of hope into terms of faith. The ripest fruit
of reason the stultification of reason. From the topmost peak of reason
James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that all is well and
will be well--the old, oh, ancient old, acrobatic flip of the
metaphysicians whereby they reasoned reason quite away in order to escape
the pessimism consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason.

"Is this flesh of yours you? Or is it an extraneous something possessed
by you? Your body--what is it? A machine for converting stimuli into
reactions. Stimuli and reactions are remembered. They constitute
experience. Then you are in your consciousness these experiences. You
are at any moment what you are thinking at that moment. Your I is both
subject and object; it predicates things of itself and is the things
predicated. The thinker is the thought, the knower is what is known, the
possessor is the things possessed.

"After all, as you know well, man is a flux of states of consciousness, a
flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self another self, a myriad
thoughts, a myriad selves, a continual becoming but ne