belongs to my self no more than does the sensation of the
smoothness of the paper on which my hand rests. I know I am a
self, because I can pass, so to speak, between the foreground
and the background of my consciousness. It is the feeling of
transition that gives me the negative and positive of my
circuit; and this feeling of transition, hunted to its lair,
reveals itself as nothing more nor less than a motor sensation
felt in the sense organs which adapt themselves to the new
conditions. I look on that picture and on this, and know that
they are two, because the change in the adaptation of my sense
organs to their objects has been felt. I close my eyes and
think of near and far, and it is the change in the sensations
from my eye muscles that tells me I have passed between the
two; or, to express it otherwise, that it is in me the two
have succeeded each other. While the self in its widest sense,
therefore, is co-extensive with consciousness, the distinctive
feeling of self as opposed to the elements in consciousness
which represent the outer world is based on those bodily
sensations which are connected with the relations of objects.
My world--the foreground of my consciousness--would fall in on
me and crush me, if I could not hold it off by just this power
to feel it different from my background; and it is felt as
different through the motor sensations involved in the change
of my sense organs in passing from one to the other. The
condition of the feeling of transition, and hence of the
feeling of personality, is then the presence in consciousness
of at least two possible objects of attention; and the formal
consciousness of self might be schematized as a straight line
connecting two points, in which one point represents the
foreground, and the other the background, of consciousness.