vii

Man must always be a consuming fire or be consumed. As for hell, we
are in a burning fiery furnace all our lives--for what is life but a
process of combustion?


Life


i

We have got into life by stealth and petitio principii, by the free
use of that contradiction in terms which we declare to be the most
outrageous violation of our reason. We have wriggled into it by
holding that everything is both one and many, both infinite in time
and space and yet finite, both like and unlike to the same thing,
both itself and not itself, both free and yet inexorably fettered,
both every adjective in the dictionary and at the same time the flat
contradiction of every one of them.

ii

The beginning of life is the beginning of an illusion to the effect
that there is such a thing as free will and that there is such
another thing as necessity--the recognition of the fact that there is
an "I can" and an "I cannot," an "I may" and an "I must."

iii