ts centre, centre of vision,
centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is 'here';
when the body acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all
other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of
emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference
to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the
systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no
developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that
ordered form. So far as 'thoughts' and 'feelings' can be active, their
activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through
first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of
the rest of the world. The body is the storm centre, the origin
of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that
experience-train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its
point of view. The word 'I,' then, is primarily a noun of position,
just like 'this' and 'here.' Activities attached to 'this' position
have prerogative emphasis, and, if activities have feelings, must be
felt in a peculiar way. The word 'my' designates the kind of emphasis.
I see no inconsistency whatever in defending, on the one hand, 'my'
activities as unique and opposed to those of outer nature, and, on the
other hand, in affirming, after introspection, that they consist in
movements in the head. The 'my' of them is the emphasis, the feeling
of perspective-interest in which they are dyed.]

mere descriptive analysis of any one of our activity-experiences is
not the whole story, that there is something still to tell _about_
them that has led such able writers to conceive of a _Simon-pure_
activity, of an activity _an sich_, that does, and doesn't merely
appear to us to do, and compared with whose real doing all this
phenomenal activity is but a specious sham.

The metaphysical question opens here; and I think that the state of
mind of one possessed by it is often something like this: 'It is
all very well,' we may imagine him saying, 'to talk about certain
experience-series taking on the form of feelings of activity, just as
they might take on musical or geometric forms. Suppose that they do
so; suppose that what we feel is a will to stand a strain. Does our
feeling do more than _record_ the fact that the strain is sustained?
The _real_ activity, meanwhile, is the _doing_ of the fact; and what
is the doing made of before the record is made? What i