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 so long as I remain alive.  And I myself, the essential me, am the light and watcher in the mouth of the cave.

So I think of myself, and so I think of all other human beings, as circles of thought and experience, each a little different from the others.  Each human being I see as essentially a circle of thought between an internal and an external world.

I figure these circles of thought as more or less imperfectly focussed pictures, all a little askew and vague as to margins and distances.  In the internal world arise motives, and they pass outward through the circle of thought and are modified and directed by it into external acts.  And through speech, example, and a hundred various acts, one such circle, one human mind, lights and enlarges and plays upon another.  That is the image under which the interrelation of minds presents itself to me.

2.5.  The problem of motives the real problem of life.

Now each self among us, for all its fluctuations and vagueness of boundary, is, as I have already pointed out, invincibly persuaded of Free Will.  That is to say, it has a persuasion of responsible control over the impulses that teem from the internal world and tend to express themselves in act.  The problem of that control and its solution is the reality of life.  “What am I to do?” is the perpetual question of our existence.  Our metaphysics, our beliefs are all sought as subsidiary to that and have no significance without it.