“I wasn’t talking about knowledge.⁠ ⁠… I was talking about the mental life,” laughed Dukes. “Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalise. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticise, and make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is vastly important. My God, the world needs criticising today⁠ ⁠… criticising to death. Therefore let’s live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it’s like this; while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You’ve severed the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection. And if you’ve got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple⁠ ⁠… you’ve fallen off the tree. And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it’s a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.”