clear unambiguous answer is
manifestly unfitted. Am I my body? Yes or no? It seems to me that I can
externalize and think of as "not myself" nearly everything that pertains
to my body, hands and feet, and even the most secret and central of
those living and hidden parts, the pulsing arteries, the throbbing
nerves, the ganglionic centres, that no eye, save for the surgeon's
knife has ever seen or ever will see until they coagulate in decay. So
far I am not my body; and then as clearly, since I suffer through it,
see the whole world through it and am always to be called upon where it
is, I am it. Am I a mind mysteriously linked to this thing of matter and
endeavour?

So I can present myself. I seem to be a consciousness, vague and
insecure, placed between two worlds. One of these worlds seems clearly
"not me," the other is more closely identified with me and yet is still
imperfectly me. The first I call the exterior world, and it presents
itself to me as existing in Time and Space. In a certain way I seem able
to interfere with it and control it. The second is the interior world,
having no forms in space and only a vague evasive reference to time,
from which motives arise and storms of emotion, which acts and reacts
constantly and in untraceable way with my conscious mind. And that
consciousness itself hangs and drifts about the region where the inner
world and the outer world meet, much as a patch of limelight drifts
about the stage, illuminating, affecting, following no manifest law
except that usually it centres upon the hero, my Ego.

It seems to me that to put the thing much more precisely than this is to
depart from the reality of the matter.

But so departing a little, let me borrow a phrase from Herbart and
identify myself more particularly with my mental self. It seems to me
that I may speak of myself as a circle of thought and experience hung
between these two imperfectly understood worlds of the internal and the
external and passing imperceptibly into the former. The external world
impresses me as being, as a practical fact, common to me and many
other creatures similar to myself; the internal, I find similar but not
identical with theirs. It is MINE. It seems to me at times no more than
something cut off from that external world and put into a sort of pit or
cave, much as all the inner mystery of my body, those living, writhing,
warm and thrilling organs are isolated, hidden from all eyes and
interference