John Macmurray was a Scot who fought in World War I and subsequently became a philosopher and broadcaster. In his Gifford Lectures he set out to challenge certain presuppositions in traditional thinking on the nature of the "self", which have led to its being regarded as pure "subject", as opposed to the world as "object". In this first volume of those lectures, he is concerned to establish the primacy of action in the processes of self-realization, the manner in which the forms of reflective activity are derived from and related to action, and the importance of the practical in human experience.