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.