Thus when I say “I,” the term suggests a man, one of many living in a world contrasted with his thinking, yet partly surveyed by it. These suggestions of the word “I” might well be false. This thinking might not belong to a member of the human family, and no such race as this mankind that I am thinking of might ever have existed. The natural world in which I fancy that race living, among other races of animals, might also be imaginary. Yet, in that case, what is imagination? Banish myself and my world as much as I will, the present act of banishing them subsists and is manifest; and it was this act, now unrolling itself consciously through various phases, not any particular person in any environment, that I meant when I said, “I find that I think and am.”
In like manner the terms thinking and finding, which I use for want of anything better, imply contrasts and antecedents which I may disregard. It is not a particular process called thinking, nor a particular conjunction called finding, that I need assert to exist, but merely this passing unrest, whatever you choose to call it: these pulsations and phantoms which to deny is to produce and to strive to banish is to redouble.
It might seem for a moment as if this pressing actuality of experience implied a relation between subject and object, so that an indescribable being called the ego or self was given with and involved in any actual fact. This analysis, however, is merely grammatical, and if pressed issues in mythical notions. Analysis can never find in the object what, by hypothesis, is not there; and the object, by definition, is all that is found. But there is a biological truth, discovered much later, under this alleged analytic necessity: the truth that animal experience is a product of two factors, antecedent to the experience and not parts of it, namely, organ and stimulus, body
