in absolute space, in reality I represent to myself my own self motionless and seeing move around me different objects and a man that is exterior to me, but that I convene to call me.
Will the difficulty be solved if we agree to refer everything to these axes bound to our body? Shall we know then what is a point thus defined by its relative position with regard to ourselves? Many persons will answer yes and will say that they 'localize' exterior objects.
What does this mean? To localize an object simply means to represent to oneself the movements that would be necessary to reach it. I will explain myself. It is not a question of representing the movements themselves in space, but solely of representing to oneself the muscular sensations which accompany these movements and which do not presuppose the preexistence of the notion of space.
If we suppose two different objects which successively occupy the same relative position with regard to ourselves, the impressions that these two objects make upon us will be very different; if we localize them at the same point, this is simply because it is necessary to make the same movements to reach them; apart from that, one can not just see what they could have in common.
But, given an object, we can conceive many different series of movements which equally enable us to reach it. If then we represent to ourselves a point by representing to ourselves the series of muscular sensations which accompany the movements which enable us to reach this point, there will be many ways entirely different of representing to oneself the same point. If one is not satisfied with this solution, but wishes, for instance, to bring in the visual sensations along with the muscular sensations, there will be one or two more ways of representing to oneself this same point and the difficulty will only be increased.