ecial system of organs, but under certain conditions
can work and be worked upon by other will-powers like itself: so that if,
for example, A's will-power has got such hold on B's as to be able,
through B, to work B's mechanism, what seems to have been B's action will
in reality have been more A's than B's, and this in the same real sense
as though the physical action had been effected through A's own
mechanical system--A, in fact, will have been living in B. The
universally admitted maxim that he who does this or that by the hand of
an agent does it himself, shews that the foregoing view is only a
roundabout way of stating what common sense treats as a matter of course.

Hence, though A's individual will-power must be held to cease when the
tools it works with are destroyed or out of gear, yet, so long as any
survivors were so possessed by it while it was still efficient, or,
again, become so impressed by its operation on them through work that he
has left, as to act in obedience to his will-power rather than their own,
A has a certain amount of _bona fide_ life still remaining. His
vicarious life is not affected by the dissolution of his body; and in
many cases the sum total of a man's vicarious action and of its outcome
exceeds to an almost infinite extent the sum total of those actions and
works that were effected through the mechanism of his own physical
organs. In these cases his vicarious life is more truly his life than
any that he lived in his own person.

"True," continued the Doctor, "while living in his own person, a man
knows, or thinks he knows, what he is doing, whereas we have no reason to
suppose such knowledge on the part of one whose body is already dust; but
the consciousness of the doer has less to do with the livingness of the
deed than people generally admit. We know nothing of the power that sets
our heart beating, nor yet of the beating itself so long as it is normal.
We know nothing of our breathing or of our digestion, of the
all-important work we achieved as embryos, nor of our growth from infancy
to manhood. No one will say that these were not actions of a living
agent, but the more normal, the healthier, and thus the more truly
living, the agent is, the less he will know or have known of his own
action. The part of our bodily life that enters into our consciousness
is very small as compared with that of which we have no consciousness.
What completer proof can we have that livingness c