§ 1. The Personal Series. — On the perceptual level, there is a bipartition of conscious experience into two parts, one belonging to the Self and the other to the Not-Self. To the Self belong all sensations like the pain of a wound, which exist or at least persist independently of external impressions; all organic sensations and appetites; all active impulses and experiences of free movement. To the Not-Self belong all those experiences to which the organism must adjust its movements in order to make them efficient in the attainment of practical ends. Now adjustment is possible only in so far as the experiences to which adjustment is made arise from conditions independent of the organism itself and its movements. Thus changes and differences in sense-experience, if and so far as they depend purely on free motor activities, belong to the Self. Only in so far as they are determined for and not by the percipient subject do they possess the independence which makes it possible to speak of motor activities being adjusted to them. Thus the physical object reveals itself in actual perception as existing, persisting, and changing in relative independence of the motor activity of the percipient. The case of ideal construction is analogous. This also is an activity primarily directed to practical ends; and in order to be effective, it must adjust itself to conditions which it does not create. These conditions are physical objects and relations as ideally represented. On the other hand, the process of ideal construction is an activity of the Self, just as the motor activity involved in perception is. The ends pursued are dictated by the nature of the Self. So too the order and manner of devising means for the attainment of these ends is largely within subjective control. The order in which ideas occur is very far from corresponding with the order of objective facts. In ideal construction the mind starts with the idea of the end; in the order of nature the end comes last. In a train of thought objects and processes may be represented together and compared which in the order of nature are widely separated in space and time. The same holds true of perceptual process; the order in which the parts and qualities of an object are perceived in no way corresponds with their actual relations. The percipient may see a thing and touch it afterwards, or he may touch it first and see it afterwards. But this subjective order has nothing to do with the physical relation of tactile and visible qualities in the thing itself. We may look at the parts of a building successively, but they do not actually occur successively.

Now when ideal representation is concerned not with the physical world but with the Self, it follows and adjusts itself to what we have called the subjective order. It follows and adjusts itself to the order in which the experiences of an individual have actually occurred in the lifehistory of that individual. This may be illustrated by the distinction between order of exposition and order of discovery. If a man, after testing the qualities of a cigar, is asked what sort of cigar it is, he may say that it has an excellent flavour and is in good condition. His thoughts are concentrated merely on the nature of the cigar, without reference to himself. If he is asked how he has found out that it has these qualities, he may say that he began by looking at it, that he then felt it, that he put it to his nose and smelt it, that he put it to his ear and heard it crackle, and so on. His thoughts follow the subjective order, — the order in which his experiences had actually occurred.

The material for the ideal construction of the Self consists therefore in organic sensations and appetites, in motor impulses and activities, and in ideational impulses and activities. The order of construction is the order in which these experiences actually occur, as distinguished from the order of the objects with which they are concerned. Reference to these objects is involved, but only because we cannot think of a perception or idea without thinking of it as the perception or idea of something.

It is evident that the bodily organism must be a very prominent constituent of the Self as thus apprehended. The order in which sensations come to us depends on movements of the body and of the organs of sense which are under our control. Organic sensations, and those which persist after external impressions such as wounds and blows, are localised in the organism itself; and since these are subjective, the organism, being inseparably connected with them, must be regarded as belonging to the Self rather than the Not-Self. Even when the mind is absorbed in its own train of ideas, the presence of its own body constitutes an important part of its experience. Whatever objects may be absent, the body itself is always present. We cannot move away from it and leave it behind. It constantly enters into actual experience; it is not an external condition to which motor activity must conform itself; it is the indispensable condition of there being any motor activity at all. At the same time, it does not belong purely to the Self. In some ways it is just like external objects. One part of the organism can perceive another, just as it can perceive anything else. This analogy between the body and other material things becomes more and more completely realised with the general development of knowledge; till in the end it becomes possible to conceive of the Self in abstraction from the material organism as such. But this is a very late result of intellectual development. It constitutes a point of view foreign to the ordinary thinking even of educated and civilised men. The word "I" in ordinary language as often as not refers directly to the body; as when we say "I took a walk," "I fell down a pit," " I swallowed a glass of wine."