Does this history of thinking about the self have anything to tell us about what the self is? I began with no ambition to answer so grand a question; indeed my belief that being “only a historian” shielded me from having to provide an answer was one thing that gave me courage to undertake the project in the first place. As things went along, however, my protective canopy of professional identity began to show some rips and tears. Only after a long period of bumbling did I come to the schema set out in Chapter 1, and to consider particular conceptions or images of the self in terms of the ways they attend to the three dimensions of corporeality, relationality, and reflectivity. Once this optic became central, however, it soon grew apparent that one of its attractions to me was its ability to clarify and in some degree validate my original and largely spontaneous preference for the kinds of thinking I have called multi-dimensional. It took me longer to see that, arrived at this point, I could no longer hide behind the claim that, as a historian of other people's thinking, I am not in the business of saying what the self is. I have suggested in the first chapter that, because there are good reasons to see each of the dimensions as not just in tension with the others, but also as nourished by them, one-dimensional theories are liable to give an inadequate account even of the element of the self they highlight, since they occlude its debt to the others.