"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 hold of this same notion of their being one thing each--as I choose to fancy in my foolish habit of imputing to them the same disease of thought which I find in myself--crucify the word!--The folly of my ancestors--if I ever had any--prevents my having any better expression....

Why should I not be all I feel--that sky, those clouds--the whole universe?
Hercules! what a creative genius my sensorium must be!--I'll take to writing' poetry--a mock-epic, in seventy-two books, entitled "The Universe: or, Raphael Aben-Ezra," and take Homer's Margites for my model.

Homer's?
Mine! Why must not the Margites, like everything else, have been a sensation of my own?
Hypatia used to say Homer's poetry was a part of her....