"O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind!
What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries!
And the privacy of it all!
A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.
A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can.
A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do.
An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror.
This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all -- what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why?"
-- excerpt from the introduction to:
The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
(1976, 1990), by Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes.