What am I?

Here is a question to which in all ages men have sought to give a clear
unambiguous answer, and to which a 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.