The difficulties of introspection have led many to deny the
possibility of such self-fixation. The fleeting moment passes,
and we grasp only an idea or a feeling; the Ego has slipped away
like a drop of mercury under the fingers. Like the hero of the
German poet, who wanted his queue in front,

"Then round and round, and out and in,
All day that puzzled sage did spin;
In vain; it mattered not a pin;
The pigtail hung behind him,"

when I turn round upon myself to catch myself in the act of
thinking, I can never lay hold on anything but a sensation. I
may peel off, like the leaves of an artichoke, my social self,--
my possessions and positions, my friends, my relatives; my
active self,--my books and implements of work; my clothes; even
my flesh, and sit in my bones, like Sydney Smith,--the I in me
retreating ever to an inner citadel; but I must stop with the
feeling that something moves in there. That is not what my
self IS, but what the elusive sprite feels like when I have got
my finger on him. In daily experience, however, it is
unnecessary to proceed to such extremities. The self, at a
given moment of consciousness, is felt as one group of elements
which form a foreground. The second group is, we say, before
the attention, and is not at that moment felt as self; while
the first group is vague, undifferentiated, not attended to,
but felt. Any element in this background can detach itself
and come into the foreground of attention. I become conscious
at this moment, for instance, of the weight of my shoulders
as they rest on the back of my chair: that sensation, however,