Experience is a flow but is also the totality embracing this flow so that there must be an element in it distinguished as stationary, and that is the subject. Thus the practical distinction of subject from object is one of temporality, of ways of inhabiting time or of being inhabited by time. The object is flowing relative to the stationary subject - the object is thus related to the subject, while the subject is not related to the object. This distinction, nevertheless, lies in appearance, the subject is not absolute but is a necessary property of experience. The subject is a kind of quasi-appearance, it belongs not in appearance but to the appearance of appearance where it assumes the place or function of unchangedness; this 'I' is the identical itself just behind the witness position in all experience, and as a concrete individual it brings together the sum of your experiences as if they are in a single book. To be known, or intimated in this way is to belong to a certain evidence, and the evidence itself, being appearance, rolls off, while what it is evidence of stands. It is very strange to have an idea of this element, to have a feeling of it, to be able to reach for metaphors for it, which cannot be experienced and yet is the only necessary and sufficient condition of experience - and yet it ought to be the least strange thing in the world. The strangeness speaks only for the long immaturity of thought.