He played with the possibilities that remained, seeking to do something with them, to make something new out of them, or to find something long overlooked. The quality, the contents, the filling of the moments mattered little. Perhaps it was a matter of assembling them by another sort of logic, a different form of necessity or causality which would explode the previous one. He was looking for something, but felt that he'd already looked everywhere. He tried to believe that the knowing that nothing after all was to be found was enough, was the dead-end from which he could only turn the seeking back on the seeker. Experience was endless and what he knew of it was little enough, but in the light he cast on it it was strictly limited, and able to be exhausted. And then only the light would remain, invisible in the darkness. Whatever it was, it never got old and was outside of all content and modality of content.

The imagining of a transformation in the experience of living that would render it  a sort of paradise seemed impossible to him, if the sense of this being his life was to be preserved. He had come to identify,in whatever situation he found himself, with the consistency of doubt and uncertainty about being and knowing himself. Absent the insecurity and fear of annihilation and things may seem wonderfully new-born, but the memory of who he was now would fade like a long sad dream, to revive only, perhaps, if a parallel discontent were to arise in the new life. Earlier, in looking towards his personal utopia, he'd insisted that there would need to be a retroactive redemption of all past time. This appeared to involve a meticulous return to each moment of failed striving for deeper recollectedness and its repetition with a correction or adjustment. He imagined seeing that in each such moment the very failure to see had been the missed seeing and that the door to eternity had been standing open in the very experience of time passing. He would then understand that behind the sequential appearance of time there was a different and timeless ordering of experience. But now there was no such projection. There had been far too many days that it was impossible to imagine any of them retaining an identity. They seemed, now that they dwelt only in memory, to be worth little more than fictions, as ephemeral as smoke. Now it was the enigmatic and strictly finite collection of future moments that seemed to harbour secrets that might be worth the effort to discover, precisely because, as death grew closer, the sense of his particular being became more concentrated, needing not at all to rely on memory.

He would say: As obvious as is the I, it is equally so that the I is never fully given, but rather a project. We strive to fulfil the potentialities of the self, which means a project of deepening engagement with what arises as I. Mostly, but not exclusively, this project is conceived as a continued development of the outward directed capabilities of the self, a version of making one's mark on the world. Either way it is a project of self-actualisation followed by self-realisation, which if fully embraced leads to, or is found to be, self-transcendence. Every property or accident that defines the particularity of the self is focused on and thus sublimated, replaced by its own meaning or function and then by the matrix in which that meaning or function can be what it is. What is desired to be held onto about the self, what is insisted upon as the non-negotiable limit of the self moves into closer purview and ceases to be be what it initially appeared. When insisted upon it was known only obliquely, but directly faced its need for transcendent anchoring fades and it becomes an instance of an inner possibility, a choice of a notion. But it is the realm of notions that is important and not the chooser, the act of choice and not the choice itself. This is the meaning of the causal realm, identified in Vedanta with the experience of dreamless sleep. Just as the waking world is resolved in deep sleep, the meaning of the particular is fulfilled in being dissolved into the causal. It is insistence, becoming a pure act of insistence with no need to hold onto any particular that is insisted upon.

He wondered what he was thinking about when he thought about necessity and contingency? The concepts were slippery and became confused with each other. Necessity could refer to logical necessity, the idea of necessary truth, or of being true is any possible world and so on, or necessity could refer to the inexorable brute fact to which one must finally, if reluctantly defer. This latter, necessity of the will, seemed to be the version that, to encounter and come to terms with, spelt wisdom. The other necessity, the necessity in the ideal, perhaps had the opposite effect, it was a licence for the mind to get ahead of itself, to claim a god-like kinship with truth, to mistake itself for the fount of wisdom. Or at least to be licensed to build a philosophical system of its own. And contingency, then? Surely this again referred to the brute fact that could not be melted away by any recourse to idealism, and was therefore the same as what was meant by the necessity of the will. There was an allusive force to the word contingency, which rather attracted him. It needed to be opposed to the logically necessary, and in making these oppositions or connections he was merely thinking out variants of the relations of thinking and being. The contingently necessary thus pointed to the universe as progressively distinguished out of pure freedom, while the necessarily contingent to the extraordinary quality of everyday events, their givenness. Finding himself in a contingent world, and thus a world in which the will was confronted by pure necessity, he discovered that he could know himself only in such a world, and hence its necessary contingency. The necessity in this way belonged to his own deepest nature, but as the trace of a yet more essential freedom. As if necessity necessarily could only be necessity if it were contingently so.

It seemed to him that consciousness butting up against what was most unlike itself, which it conceived as the complacent brutality of facts, had more of the essential nature of the existent, while what he was forever being tempted to think of as himself, was an idea of artificiality and specialness boxed up within, and deflecting, another idea of necessity, namely that of consciousness coinciding with an individual life. It was part of the notion of a fall into division in which nothing can stop the process until the smallest part is reached; the arrest being caused by the precursor of identification. The idea of division is merely a possibility comprehended in consciousness resting in its undivided and unchanging nature; but as such the idea must develop the cascade of its consequences to the uttermost degree. The quality that is most reflective of the original nature of the origin in this is the necessity, or the incorrigible facticity of the experienced oppositions. It could be thought of as consciousness, whose essence is pure freedom, attempting to understand itself and thus conceiving the idea of perfect necessity, its negative image. But thought itself, being precisely such a inter-relation of freedom and necessity could only partially embrace such an understanding.

In trying to understand consciousness he continually moved between two poles, two classes of metaphor. In one the the emphasis was on immersion in a world, it stressed that there could be no consciousness without embodiment. This version of consciousness was essentially dark, it started out from feeling and emerged into thought and reflectivity by acquiring more and more subtle distinctions within the  fields opened up by each new rarefaction of feeling. Consciousness here was like aviation spirit distilled out of crude oil. The whole thing rested on a core of pure, formless feeling, one that was inseparable blended with a will, something like the cellular will to live, and an inchoate urge to embrace everything, to comprehend, to be the god of its own existence - the latter being the motive for the development of intellect. The other class of metaphor was the opposite of this, here consciousness was more subtle than any spirit, odourless, pure light, and  experience, the very experience that raises the inquiry into consciousness is a structure, not of condensations - in this view consciousness cannot condense - but of contagious identifications with this pure and transcendent consciousness. In this view body and its mind are electrified by consciousness so that they seem to be its source, but it is in fact a dead material substrate which has taken on the illusion of being conscious - if it even exists in any sense at all. Neither pole made perfect sense, but each brought forward some aspect of the struggle for understanding on which he found himself engaged in spite of anything he thought possible or worthwhile. The urge would not let go, it resembled a bodily desire in its dumb insistence, and it seemed driven towards something that already belonged to him, had always been his by deepest right.

The relationship of two objects that have been looked at, say the cup on the table, or the table by the window, is determined through their distinct modes of temporalisation, of inhabiting time, preserving their boundaries while departing from and returning to themselves. Or imagine two cups on the table, an old cup and a new one, a beautiful one and an ugly one, or an accidentally beautiful one next to one beautiful by design. Like Stevens'jar in Tennessee, each thing, when seen, organises the world around it, or enacts or even donates the world. And when there are two or more things they reciprocally act on each other so that the complexity of the context they create for themselves becomes so great that we mistake it for a sort of white light, for the place of mere being. But what we see is not made entirely out of things, there are plays of light and shadow, transient effects of texture and reflections, the embodiments of participation in various climates and particularities, degrees of exposure and availability or forbiddenness. In all of these respects the world merges metaphors of mind with abstract and pattered form in a way that brings the visibility of the world close to a philosophy of clothes. Are clothes merely the coverings of bodies or are the bodies themselves the clothes of yet other clothes? Human bodies are both things and non-things, and in this they differ only in degree from everything else in the world that has, or wears, a face.

We think of the visual presentation of objects as being relatively constant in time. The tree or even the cloud we are looking at stays more or less still, actually enduring and maintaining itself as time passes - time being experienced by our cycling back to ourselves, our innate recurrent motion. On closer scrutiny the seen object moves within itself. It takes a fractional moment to become a thing, and when it has so become then at each fresh moment of its appearance it asserts itself against its memory, arising within a horizon that ever more belongs to it. The thing, or even just the patch of colour, seethes like a cloud when seen in fast motion. We see this if we look closely at the successive frames of a motion picture image of the thing, although here the cause of the motion in stillness may be differently explained. There is a moment, or fractional moment, of disruption, but succeeded immediately by an involutionary motion which recaptures it, as if it turns on itself, becoming more and more itself while a stream of eidolons evaporates out of it - so that its being only refers to the ideal of resting serenely within itself. The thing evokes, or speaks of, the ideal of a resting within itself, of the nature of thinghood being an infinite interior convergence. Language, which is innately motion, only shares in this nature to the degree that the formal element, form being timeless, predominates, as in some poetry.

It was not rare to experience a moment of serene happiness at simply being where he found himself. This happiness contained a more or less latent reflection which framed his own being as the open space in which the ecstasy of the world's sheer visibility was enacted. Under it the status of subject was unembodied and spread out into what had a moment before seemed only the object, and so concomitantly what had previously stood for the subject, what had seemed the constant, or invariant term, now took on the qualities of an object. Now it was the world in its openness to be seen that was the truly unchanging pole. The world is the actuality of the availability to be seen, to be experienced, and we fail to recognise this as the subject, because we are filled with the thought of ourselves as the significant intersection point of all the different modalities of knowingness, as the witnessing of this presence which is its own witness. If the sensory modes are like the various colours of the light spectrum then the sense of being is like white light. It is invisible until it falls on something, and whatever that thing is it glows and seems as if it is the source of light when it is really just the place where the light has been stopped.

He would either wrestle with the other, in rough strife, or else let himself be infused with sensory and ideal knowledge of her. These two goals which perhaps ought to have been complementary were usually in an uneasy and teetering balance. Another way to understand this was to say that knowing could be of the will, the thought or the feeling. A perfect blend or alternation of the three was ideal, but difficult to achieve. He wondered at the elicitings of each of these organs and at their degree of freedom in relation to each other and the object. These were varied enough to give every encounter its own unique signature and draw from it a corresponding satisfaction or frustration. But if of the three will was his weakest, then it was also where his greatest discoveries were to be made. If the one subject had split itself into these many sovereign selves it was so that it could know itself in the striving of will against will and in the paradoxical recognition of identity in the hierarchic solidarity of opposed wills. Will was the giver of order, and only out of order could distinctions first arise.

He was fascinated by the transformation in perception and in valuation brought about by sensual arousal. The contrast with the spectrum of changes brought about by his customarily varying emotional and self-referential states could not have been more dramatic. Like the flipping of a switch, what had previously been unthinkable became what best expressed his wish, and like the flipping back of the lever, the rapid reversion once it was over, leaving him stunned at what he'd suddenly been ejected from. While still in the midst of it, the attributes of the object would change not only in value and in detail but also in the kinds of absorption which they provoked. The balance in importance between the different senses was upset and the mode of interpretation lost its calculative character and became aestheticised, although in a crudely 'musical' way. The role of the objectively beautiful was usurped by an insistent and incongruent subjective version of beauty. Objective beauty was seen less as the aptitude for bringing such a transformation about as a guarantee of its congruence. The gesture became an ambiguous language of embodiment, which would either perform an apprehension of the melting away of boundaries, or fail to do so, catastrophically. All of this taking place on a kind of stage in which acts were imbued with a strange portentousness, merging the act, the word, the thought, the description, the response.

Sights and sounds dominated his notion of sensory experience, and so it was patterns and contrasts, arrangements in abstract perspective that attracted all meaning in the familiar places where he strolled. This meaning was as if read out of the changing presentation, and so it seemed that there must be patterns of words that could pick up and repeat its significances, or even that the significant configurations he was experiencing were the refracted memories of poems he'd once read. He could not develop this hunch any further, the words would not come, and certainly not with the same determinedly unemphatic pregnancy of spatiality. So it was silently the he immersed himself in the relation of this dull greenish patch and that rust coloured patch, and that grey edge of a roof against the sky. Could the relationship of things seen become the subject and he the object? He was all event and they were being, but these were in no way separable. These scenes to be effective needed to be sought out in the most familiar, to have the quality of having patiently awaited recognition, whether he of they or they of him. But also, he was forced to admit, he made too much of the modality of the visible when it was immersion in sense, in the sense of sense, the modality of modalities, that he sought. Taste, smell, feeling and the inner sense were the sleeping giants of being. No philosophy but that would sit at the feet of his nose.

Nothing can render the formless dynamism of inner experience, its turbulence, stress, wild and myopic objectifications, and reactive subjections. Thought would be caught up in it like a mote in a storm, but that it all takes place within thought - as thought, an inside with no outside, wrestles to contain itself. The distance between body and eye, as between any two of what we call senses, would seem to be unbridgeable since the respective terms into which experience is divided are untranslatable, and yet this is what excites; the eye mapping the unceasing blossoming of body, its presences and absences, its infoldings and unfoldings, the body feeding on the light the eyes digest. He could not help loving the world according to the eyes, the light-filled spaces, the spread of separation, the nakedness of exposure, until feeling itself became geometric and origin and source were confused.

Catching himself in the act of seeking reassurance from images he wondered where the mirrors ever stopped. To forget himself was to be a mirror by which the world reflected itself, and to forget himself entirely was to be the sole such mirror without a world. So to be-there was to infringe and then to generate cascading ripples of response that seemingly retained the imprint of his form, but in a something else. Before he could seek his image he needed to make this other into a mirror. But it was only later that there was any talk of need, for now it was only fascination. It was the spacing that was so fascinating, there hadn't been a here before there was a there, and once there was a there the here became an absence, a crossed-out there. It was this kind of thing that made the transmission of similitudes possible or else it was the similitudes that made transmission possible. Transmission and alteration and confluence and diremption immediately set to work to create another world within the world which turned out to be nothing but the world, but now with him inside it, forever lost, but inside it. No wonder that this mirror play threw him the substantial name of subject, and scattered him among a myriad of other subjects like shards of a broken mirror.

Try to start out from the simple given of your body and it is impossible to stop short of the entire phenomenon, the entire (one) without a second. To draw a boundary, saying on this side is my body and on that the world, is laughably absurd; where and how is the line being drawn? And the same goes for mind or space or reality and appearance, these can only be set apart provisionally, and it is within that strange providence that our lives play themselves out. If it could be said that a process was going on, then the working parts would begin to distinguish themselves and their workings, the whole folding over in itself again and again in unlimited complexity, as if that initial distinction could never find satisfaction, could never be assuaged, but had to go endlessly devouring itself. The resulting explosion of complexity is a centreless web, or more accurately a web whose every node is its centre. But to make the shapes we recognise something more is required, a secondary process built over this cosmic web and which mindlessly drives towards local minima, and hence generates form and stability, modes of recurrence. To be the experience of a subject is to be just such a constrained play of modes, patterns and recurrences, a life which exercises all available resources to the most remote, but in an oddly constrained and limited way. The secondary process is known as what it feels like. But the experience of a subject and what it feels like are nothing to the subject.

A cold-spell in September seemed to him a final flurry of the winter. From mid Autumn the season had had a distinct character, a time of long walks, eyes wide open to the streetscape as if it were being newly discovered, and regular evenings when he dawdled reflectively in the teahouse. Certain recurrent actions becoming habits so that each instance no longer had a singular character but seemed only to belong in a sequence of indefinite extension which was itself a single event, but in a mysteriously thick time. Such was the performance of slipping on his short navy-blue coat with a notebook dropped into the torn left pocket and a camera bulging in the right, and walking out into the dark. Down the carpeted corridor to the door to L. street then, most of the time, south towards E. street, along a footpath he'd traced myriad times, but seemed never to have looked at as sharply. Forming the horizon to this activity, and indistinct, were the many different chapters of life to which this piece of landscape had contributed a part. He might have played with the conceit of the facades or the trees or the tramlines watching him come and go and gradually transform into new versions of himself, but it was not this sort of personification that struck him as much as how it would look if the time were collapsed into a brief interval. The motion of everything would be revealed, not only the trees and skies but the facades and tramlines as well, and most of all this froth of humanity, the delirious kaleidoscope of inner lives, his own, almost lost among them, but bravely spangling and sputtering its murky and occasionally bright tones. This picture was a necessary counterpart to the sharp sense of presence he felt each time he walked out, the salt edge of breathing life he poured into the abyss of place.

He would often find himself at the collapsing edge of futile strivings as if coming awake for a moment in the dream of his life. That thing, now identified as a contemptible knot of self-occlusion, had moments before been his adventure, his discovering of larger scope. He'd been laboriously pulling himself up on what had started out as a happy meandering in the foothills of spirit. And when a fork in the path appeared he'd unhesitatingly chosen the upward way welcoming the striving and self-discipline that would be needed to persist on it. As the mere inclination faded the will took its place, justifying itself by a sort of faith or by the confidence in a gamble that further openings must arise. When these failed to come the will to persist grew even stronger, riding on the fallacy of sunk costs, and took on a self-punishing edge. But such a harshness eventually becomes indistinguishable from self-contempt and causes the entire project to collapse. There is no rapid descent, simply a discovery that here he was again, in that sweet foul place where all the ladders start. He would have loved to stay forever, make it his home, refuse all invitations, but he knew that the seeds of familiar desires were already stirring freshly in the junk.

It was perhaps only a grammatical accident that the verb to be should be both transitive and intransitive. To be here was always to already be something and yet the something appeared contingent and changeable so that it seemed that an intransitive being must lie behind the activity of presence. Again, the same logic could be applied to having in the sense that presence was always the possession of a certain self or identity. One cannot be present without knowing oneself to be present and hence being able to identify certain contents as oneself, beginning with short-term memory. The connections between short-term memory, the memory of a second or two in the past with medium term memory of roughly a day and with long-term memory embracing the entire previous life is contingent, although usually taken for granted. The property accumulated in this way and identified as our own in apparent but necessary unmediatedness is often immense, but the possibility that it can be disowned, or even redeemed in some way, is seized upon, or possibly recognised, the moment it is suggested. This impression of being a stranger to oneself is only enhanced by evidence of the inaccuracy of long-term memories, of their dream-like revisioning. Still, these arguments seemed to him to be superficial, they were attempts to tease the past into revealing itself. The secret of time was not in the punctilious present but in its failure to contain something too large for its divisions.

His explorations in search of orientation and synthesis were undertaken with waking mind and this entailed a functional bias against a dreaming mind which had its own effortless and quite different orientation and synthesis. If the quality of awareness and fluid thinking found on waking in the small hours was a clue then this reverse side of the day always kept the key anxieties in sight: death, isolation, insignificance and sceptical doubt. Although waking mind brought a soothing relief from these, a relief felt deep in the body as well as in the mind, its gifts came not from any certain knowledge but simply from having a job to do. Unanswerable questions needed to be put aside to get on with practical engagements with a daily reality that happened to be tolerably regular most of the time - a matter of sheer luck. The world with which waking mind would engage was all too happy to do his dreaming and desiring for him, and to define the shapes and limits of anxiety, as if its goal was to become a surrogate for dreams in eliciting and engaging a self. This world-given self was so much larger than the private one, and seemed anyway to have accommodated its needs with so much foresight that to swim against the current back towards the original self required passage through an almost impassable region of contraction and boredom.

He'd come close enough, on a few occasions, to the kind of unburdening and regathering he aspired to that he had a sense of what it would be like. While it was valued as the true expression of himself he had to admit that the voice inseparable from it was not his own familiar voice, but a lyrical voice, and hence an ideal voice. It offered no solution to even the everyday conundrum of the disjunction between the creative and appreciative moods. Still, he thought a natural attraction would pull him into it. This idea was a consequence of a feature of that very voice, namely its lowness, its quality of having yielded to gravity, its affinity with a melancholy of the most soothing kind. Everything which added to his weight seemed to promise the inevitability of a collapse of the floodgates, an outpouring, a release from below. In this spirit he welcomed the dissipation of hope, the disassociation from pictures of a wonderful future, the weakening power of the defenses that held it all up. Increasing age, it turned out, instead of stripping away the inessential and revealing the essential, did something else, it made him more himself, caused him to crystallise around the quirks and deviations that had always been his. The kind of skittish foolishness and the coarse and hasty discernment that were the enemies of simple unclouded vision had increased at least in proportion to the mature disillusionment. He took on roles, posed as much as ever, and believed in the roles, perhaps believed in them more than ever, now that the roles included the layered pretense at no longer believing in them. In this he participated intimately in the age's futile attempts to throw off irony after its treachery had become evident.

He had the idea that honesty was an objective value and so the direction in which it lay could always be made out. Honesty is the way that the soul in conversing with itself, or with another, collects its scattered powers and becomes more centred in itself. It is less about discovering unknown truths than about relinquishing fruitful errors, but what had always kept him drawn to it was an aesthetic quality, a kind of music that he perhaps would have given anything for, in spite of any falsehood. Objectivity was something else again, since if its distinction from subjectivity was intrinsic to experience this distinction was also reflective. This meant that there was always the beginning of a procedure for setting them apart. But one could have a prejudice in favour of the objective without this meaning that one had any instinct for truth, and much less honesty. As against his notion that growing honest was a matter of surrendering to a certain field of attraction - discovered perhaps in moving closer to death, where its distinctive music would begin to be heard - there was his experience that honesty was a fleeting phenomenon, like artistic beauty, and required the same peculiar combination of application and chance to come about. The very principle of errancy and scattering was intimate in a way that truth could never be.

He found himself in a world where resemblance and imitation marked the lines of connection and also the only location of its elusive nodes. Great premium was therefore placed on originality and authenticity since these existed as powerful conjunctions in the system, ones which seemed to be independently definable and so able to promise that the entire system was anchored somewhere. The idea of an anchoring was possibly essential, although many claimed to be able to dispense with it entirely, but in any case, so long as it was assured that no-one else could claim it, it needed to be off-stage. The coveted quality of authenticity was like that of a special wine, celebrated through the resemblances within its bouquet to other sensations, remote flavours, smells or even generic memories. The language became one of semblances, of seemings, intricate evasions of is, which were the expressions of legitimate deference. This move lent an almost frenzied intensiveness to connectedness, although even connectedness could only be taken to resemble connection. It was not so much an atomised world, as a world under the sway of the least perceptible difference.

In his world there were no longer any master ideas, there was no sacred architecture of the ideal. The brute fact or the particular did not demand elucidation. It was generally considered better to simply tie a collection of these unscrutinised facts together, and employ statistics for comprehension, for drawing out a contingent and acceptable generality. This was a way of appropriating the movement from particular to ideal and however the mechanism might be debated, and the debates were the most lively thing about it, what was not debated was its direction. But for those whose desire was to find the extension of the particular in contemplation the progression was to the event, embracing seer and seen in ever greater particularity. This was seen as a cunning evasion of the idea, and yet was itself a refinement of an idea, one whose initial blossoming in the world of art had led, by its very celebrated thoughtlessness, to catastrophic consequences.

In a world delineated and ramified by purposes there is some relief offered by aesthetic perception. The object, formerly there for the sake of something else, is able to be viewed in its pure thusness, or under eternity - as long as that eternity is of the grain of sand variety. Whether these two modes of vision are seen as complementary or as competing, their relationship is taken to be horizontal, in the sense that they are on the same plain of reality; neither abolishes the other, their alternation is a matter of attention and oblivion, their conflicts quintessentially political. Where the purposive world is ruled by the polarity of gratification and frustration, the aesthetic world has only gradations of delight, say from satisfaction to rapture or from rapture to satisfaction. For this reason a preference for the aesthetic may develop, although this is more a matter of loosening its powerful connections to the purposeful, replacing the purposeful grasp of the aesthetic with the aesthetic contemplation of the purposeful. If this can be extended far enough it leads to a form of spirituality, one that is entirely immanent. It is worth wondering however whether the insistence on immanence, which was one of the unspoken shibboleths of his time, the moral obligation to be horizontal, is not an arrest. What is the engine of delight in the beholding of things suspended weightlessly in themselves? Does not this lightness long to fulfill itself in the vision of beauty? And is not the abode of beauty both within us and above the world?

A large proportion of his mental activity was concerned with the logistics of purposes. The purposes were given as self-evident corollaries of desires, and the desires themselves treated as ideals - in the sense that denying them was seen as being untrue to himself. This equation of desires with the cultivation of authenticity with ultimate value was founded on nothing more than the spirit of the times. To have questioned the truth inherent in this spirit would be to make himself ridiculous. Nonetheless, in spite of their naturalness, there was a plethora of desires and their goals were frequently in conflict, hence the complex logistics required to balance their demands and meta-demands - some desires seeking not so much gratification as legitimation in order to attenuate their clamour. Another fraction of mental activity was concerned with managing the moral implication of the actions mediated by the former kind of activity. The object of this moral deliberation was himself and his legitimate freedom. Here again he would borrow figures of thought from the culture, from its rich veins of evaluation and judgement and apply them to himself. Where the first kind of mental activity was directed to the future, the second surveyed the past. Here, for example, was the notion that confession was a cleansing, and thus that self-examination should be ruthlessly objective. It was not that such devices were ineffective, but rather that their very success reinforced, by means of positive feedback, a thoroughly illusory metaphysics.