He lived in a strange kind of isolation, the mainstays of which were the most local of percepts. These defined a frame in which his acts were a set of apotropaic manoeuvres, entirely response. Every instance was thus a sort of dice-throw, or rather, since there was no dice-thrower, and re-framing of the encounter as aleatory. All of this was affirmed in a meta-knowledge that was fitted to tacit acceptance. What was thought, and emerged as the thinking of a thinker, was dictated by the newly contingent frame, but the passivity in relation to the changes of frames was treated as simply nature.