immediate life. I do not deny this; but these ancestral accidents
were either turned to account, or neglected where they might have
been taken advantage of; they thus passed either into skill, or want
of skill; so that whichever way the fact is stated the result is the
same; and if simplicity of statement be regarded, there is no more
convenient way of putting the matter than to say that though luck is
mighty, cunning is mightier still. Organism commonly shows its
cunning by practising what Horace preached, and treating itself as
more plastic than its surroundings; those indeed who have had the
greatest the first to admit that they had gained their ends more by
reputation as moulders of circumstances have ever been shaping their
actions and themselves to suit events, than by trying to shape
events to suit themselves and their actions. Modification, like
charity, begins at home.

But however this may be, there can be no doubt that cunning is in
the long run mightier than luck as regards the acquisition of
property, and what applies to property applies to organism also.
Property, as I have lately seen was said by Rosmini, is a kind of
extension of the personality into the outside world. He might have
said as truly that it is a kind of penetration of the outside world
within the limits of the personality, or that it is at any rate a
prophesying of, and essay after, the more living phase of matter in
the direction of which it is tending. If approached from the
dynamical or living side of the underlying substratum, it is the
beginning of the comparatively stable equilibrium which we call
brute matter; if from the statical side, that is to say, from that
of brute matter, it is the beginning of that dynamical state which
we associate with life; it is the last of ego and first of non ego,
or vice versa, as the case may be; it is the ground whereon the two