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to his friend Howells that he had become a “dead” man, a mere “mud image, & it puzzles me to know what it is in me that writes, & that has comedy-fancies & finds pleasure in phrasing them. . . . the thing in me forgets the presence of the mud image & goes its own way wholly unconscious of it & apparently of no kinship with it.” In A Connecticut Yankee, he has Hank Morgan proclaim man’s duty in this “sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me. ” Elsewhere, he describes this self as a “vagrant thought,” “wandering among the empty eternities.” In a letter to his sister-in-law, Susan Crane (reprinted in this volume), he muses that his whole life might have been a dream and that he has no certain way to prove it otherwise. These are not the musings of an out-and-out materialist who believes human beings are machines and nothing more.
    In any event, his system served him well enough in the creation of such short fiction as “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899), What Is Man? (1906), “Little Bessie” (ca. 1908), and Letters from the Earth (ca. 1909); and in parts (but only in parts) of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and A Connecticut Yankee. Twain might even explain the physical organization of microorganisms as a form of social hierarchy governed chiefly by pride and envy, as he did in “Three Thousand Years among the Microbes” (1905). He would reaffirm his philosophy in essays such as “Corn-Pone Opinions” (1901) and “The Turning Point of My Life” (1910) and in several of his letters. In one of his more amusing philosophic outbursts in a letter to Joseph Twichell (reprinted in this volume), he describes his experience of reading the Puritan Jonathan Edwards on the will as resembling “having been on a three days’ tear with a drunken lunatic.” In a word, however dark this philosophic vision may have been, it did not harness the sheer audacity of his humor or the sting of his wit. Nor did it impinge upon his social and political convictions or restrain his fiery denunciation of tyranny, imperialism, and demogoguery.
    On the other hand, Twain was continually driving beyond the limits of his own philosophy, without regard to logic, system, or continuity. In Chapter 31 of the novel, Huckleberry Finn is tortured by his guilty conscience for depriving Miss Watson of her rightful property by helping Jim to freedom. However improbable his decision is (and given his upbringing it is improbable indeed), he is heroic in choosing to go to hell rather than betray his companion. Twain himself later described Huck’s conduct as the triumph of a “sound heart” over a “deformed conscience.” Hank Morgan believes that “training is everything” and foolishly attempts to transform King Arthur’s England by introducing nineteenth-century ideas of political and religious liberty and the conveniences provided by industrial progress and technological efficiency. The conjunction of these two worlds makes for wonderful comedy, of course. However, in the end the dying Morgan believes his own modern world is the product of delirium and dream and reaches out, across thirteen centuries, for everything that is dear to him—his wife, his child, his friends, his antique life.
    Ultimately, Twain’s determinism is not very interesting in itself, not as philosophy and not as an existential position he fashioned out of his own disappointments. Ironically perhaps, it was useful because it permitted him certain antic freedoms that were more in his line than synthetic explanations of human behavior. And his philosophizing does seem to have supplied him with a rationalized defense post from which he might launch repeated attacks on human vanity or, alternately, on a God that