"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, 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