A human being is thus a mere piece of machinery, a toy—complicated, very complicated, but a toy of impersonal cosmic forces. A person’s self-consciousness is only an epiphenomenon; it is just part of the machinery looking at itself. But consciousness is only part of the machinery; there is no “self” apart from the machinery. There is no “ego” that can stand over against the system and manipulate it at its own will. Its “will” is the will of the cosmos. In this picture, by the way, we have a rather