INDIVIDUALITY AND WORLD 629 



of our inner world are variable ; they cannot apparently be referred to 

 environmental constants with the same fixity and definiteness as can the sense 

 impressions; thoughts and emotions seem individual and indeterminate, dif- 

 fering in different persons at the same time and place. Hence, thoughts and 

 emotions appear not to be predictable. 



Thoughts represent abstractions and syntheses into which memories of 

 individually varying experiences enter. The emotional reactions also vary 

 widely in different persons and have much of the character of a mystery, 

 because in the individual affected they are largely unanalyzed. In this sense 

 our bodily organismal constitution as a whole, and especially the brain 

 activities, in which our thoughts and emotions originate, seem more particu- 

 larly our own than the operations of the sense organs, which reproduce for 

 us our environment. What is unique and unexplainable, and therefore appar- 

 ently free and not a directly determined function of the environment, we 

 refer thus to the inner world, to our psychical individuality. 



But if we analyze our inner world still further, we find, as stated above, 

 that it as well as our outer world consists largely of sense impressions ; 

 these enter as essential constituents into our pictures, thoughts and wills, 

 which are derived primarily from the outside. There may also participate in 

 the construction of our inner world, those sensations which originate in cer- 

 tain parts of our own body. When we speak our thoughts or see our own 

 body, we perceive them through the ear and eye as we perceive those of 

 another individual. Certain psychologists go so far as to maintain that all 

 our thoughts are perceived as the result of the activities of our speech 

 muscles, even if we do not actually speak. It is especially the memory and 

 anticipation of the feelings associated with muscle contractions in response 

 to certain thoughts and pictures which make us aware of our will. Further- 

 more, there is added to the central, psychical constituent of our individuality, 

 a picture of our bodily configuration. We acquire this picture of our body 

 gradually as we acquire that of another individual. Our body, as well as our 

 mind, is to a large extent strange to us. If we see our own image in an 

 unusual set of mirrors, we are astonished that this is a reflection of our- 

 selves. The physicist and philosopher, Ernst Mach, when entering a bus and 

 seeing his image in a mirror exclaimed, "Who is the school teacher that 

 enters this car !" We have to become acquainted with our own body as with 

 the body of another person ; also with our own mind as with the minds of 

 others. The "self" or "I" is an abstraction ; it does not really exist in the 

 sense in which we believe it exists. We hardly know our own self any better 

 than we know other individuals or the world around us. 



However, when we analyze more in detail our individuality in the 

 psychical sense, we find that the interactions between what we consider as 

 outer and as inner world are still more complex than the preceding con- 

 siderations have indicated. This is due to the fact that the thought reflex 

 works in two directions. A thought as a representation of the outer world 

 may set in motion in our organism corresponding functions of various organ 

 systems, and in particular, motor reactions ; thus the picture of a good meal 



