The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced.  The world experienced (otherwise called the ‘field of consciousness’) comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest.  Where the body is is ‘here’; when the body acts is ‘now’; what the body touches is ‘this’; all other things are ‘there’ and ‘then’ and ‘that.’  These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form.  So far as ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’ can be active, their activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest of the world.  The body is the storm centre, the origin of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train.  Everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view.  The word ‘I,’ then, is primarily a noun of position, just like ‘this’ and ‘here.’  Activities attached to ‘this’ position have prerogative emphasis, and, if activities have feelings, must be felt in a peculiar way.  The word ‘my’ designates the kind of emphasis.  I see no inconsistency whatever in defending, on the one hand, ‘my’ activities as unique and opposed to those of outer nature, and, on the other hand, in affirming, after introspection, that they consist in movements in the head.  The ‘my’ of them is the emphasis, the feeling of perspective-interest in which they are dyed.]

mere descriptive analysis of any one of our activity-experiences is not the whole story, that there is something still to tell about them that has led such able writers to conceive of a Simon-pure activity, of an activity an sich, that does, and doesn’t merely appear to us to do, and compared with whose real doing all this phenomenal activity is but a specious sham.

The metaphysical question opens here; and I think that the state of mind of one possessed by it is often something like this:  ’It is all very well,’ we may imagine him saying, ’to talk about certain experience-series taking on the form of feelings of activity, just as they might take on musical or geometric forms.  Suppose that they do so; suppose that what we feel is a will to stand a strain.  Does our feeling do more than record the fact that the strain is sustained?  The real activity, meanwhile, is the doing of the fact; and what is the doing made of before the record is made?  What in the will enables it to act thus?  And these trains of experience themselves, in which activities appear, what makes them go at all?  Does the activity in one bit of experience bring the next bit into being?  As an empiricist you cannot say so, for you have just declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic object, or conjunctive relation experienced between bits of experience already made.  But what made them at all?  What propels experience ueberhaupt into being? There is the activity that operates; the activity felt is only its superficial sign.’