ry. All are equally inescapable.

The activity of the complex vision, then, makes us aware that we
have within us an integral irreducible self, the living personal
substratum of our self-consciousness, the "I" of our primordial "I
am I." This living personal self is the background of our complex
vision. It is the personal "visionary" whose vision we are using. I
say we have "within us" such a self. This "within us" is one of the
inescapable original revelations. For though our consciousness
will be found in its full circle to invade obscure shores and
wavering margins, there must always be a return, however far it
may wander, to this definite "something" within us which utters
the happy or unhappy "I am I."

It is precisely here, in regard to the nature of this "I am I," that it
is essential to let the totality of our complex vision speak, and not
one or other of its attributes. Nowhere has the fantastic and
desolating power of pure abstract reason left to itself done more to
distort the general situation than in this matter. It has distorted it
in two opposing ways.

It has distorted it metaphysically by completely eliminating this
revelation of a personal self, "within us," and it has distorted it
scientifically by reducing this personal self to an automatic
mechanical phenomenon produced by the action and interaction of
unconscious chemical "forces."

To the logic of metaphysical reason there is no concrete living self
which can say "I am I" from that definite point in space and time
which we indicate by the use of the phrase "within us." According
to such logic our "I am I" becomes "an infinity of consciousness"
with no local habitation. It becomes a consciousness which
includes both the "within" and the "without," a consciousness in
which our actual personal self is nothing but an illusory
phenomenon, a consciousness which is outside both time and
space, a consciousness whose centre is everywhere and its
circumference nowhere, a consciousness which is pure disembodied
"thought," thought without any "thinker," thought contemplating
itself as thought, thought in an absolutely empty void.

When to this ultimate "unity of apperception," suspended
in a vacuum, consciousness of self is added; when this
"consciousness-in-the-abstract" is regarded as an universal
self-consciousness, the resultant "I am I" of such an omnipresent
being becomes an infinite "I am I" which is nothing less than the
unfathomable universe