r begs the question in hand,
and then marches forward, as brave as a triumph, and prides himself--on
proving it all afterwards. No wonder that his theory fits the universe,
when he has first clipped the universe to fit his theory. Have I not
tried my hand at many a one--starting, too, no one can deny, with the
very minimum of clipping,.... for I suppose one cannot begin lower than
at simple "I am I".... unless--which is equally demonstrable--at "I am
not I." I recollect--or dream--that I offered that sweet dream, Hypatia,
to deduce all things in heaven and earth, from the Astronomics of
Hipparchus to the number of plumes in an archangel's wing, from that one
simple proposition, if she would but write me out a demonstration of it
first, as some sort of [Greek expression] for the apex of my inverted
pyramid. But she disdained.... People are apt to disdain what they know
they cannot do.... "It was an axiom," it was, "like one and one making
two.".... How cross the sweet dream was, at my telling her that I did
not consider that any axiom either, and that one thing and one thing
seeming to us to be two things, was no more proof that they really were
two, and not three hundred and sixty-five, than a man seeming to be
an honest man, proved him not to be a rogue; and at my asking her,
moreover, when she appealed to universal experience, how she proved that
the combined folly of all fools resulted in wisdom!

'"I am I" an axiom, indeed! What right have I to say that I am not any
one else? How do I know it? How do I know that there is any one else
for me not to be? I, or rather something, feel a number of sensations,
longings, thoughts, fancies--the great devil take them all--fresh ones
every moment, and each at war tooth and nail with all the rest; and
then on the strength of this infinite multiplicity and contradiction,
of which alone I am aware, I am to be illogical enough to stand up, and
say, "I by myself I," and swear stoutly that I am one thing, when all I
am conscious of is the devil only knows how many things. Of all quaint
deductions from experience, that is the quaintest! Would it not be more
philosophical to conclude that I, who never saw or felt or heard this
which I call myself, am what I have seen, heard, and felt--and no more
and no less--that sensation which I call that horse, that dead man,
that jackass, those forty thousand two-legged jackasses who appear to be
running for their lives below there, having got hol