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.This fact leads the naive man to the belief that infeeling, existence is present directly, in knowledge only indirectly.Therefore thedevelopment of the feeling-life appears to him more important than anything else.He willbelieve that he has grasped the connection of things only when he has felt it.He attemptsto make feelings rather than knowing the means of cognition.But as feeling is somethingquite individual, something equivalent to perception, a philosopher of feeling makes intothe universal principle, a principle which has significance only within his personality.Hetries to permeate the whole world with his own self.What the monist, in the sense wehave described, strives to grasp by means of concepts, the philosopher of feeling tries toattain by means of feeling, and considers this relationship with objects to be the one thatis most direct.The view just characterized, the philosophy of feeling, is often called mysticism.Theerror in mysticism based on feeling alone is that the mystic wants to experience43 infeeling what should be attained as knowledge; he wants to develop something which isindividual, into something universal.Feeling is purely individual, it is the relation of the external world to our subject, insofaras this relation comes to expression in merely subjective experience.There is yet anotherexpression of the human personality.The I, through its thinking, lives within theuniversal life of the world; through thinking the I relates purely ideally (conceptually)the perception to itself, and itself to the perception.In feeling, it experiences a relation ofthe object to its own subject.In the will, the opposite is the case.In will, we are againconfronted with a perception, namely that of the individual relation of our own self to theobject.Everything in the will which is not a purely ideal factor is just as much a merelyperceived object as any object in the external world.Nevertheless, here again the naive realist believes that he has before him something farmore real than can be reached by thinking.He sees in the will an element in which he isdirectly aware of a process, a causation, in contrast to thinking, which must first grasp theprocess in concepts.What the I brings about by its will represents to such a view, aprocess which is experienced directly.An adherent of this philosophy believes that in thewill he has really got hold of a corner of the universal process.Whereas all other eventshe can follow only by perceiving them from outside, he believes that in his will he isexperiencing a real process quite directly.The form of existence in which the willappears to him within the self becomes for him a direct principle of reality.His own willappears to him as a special case of the universal process, and he therefore considers thelatter to be universal will.The will becomes the universal principle just as in mysticismof feeling, feeling becomes the principle of knowledge.This view is a Philosophy of theWill (Thelism).44 Here something which can be experienced only individually is madeinto the constituent factor of the world.The philosophy of will can be called a science as little as can mysticism of feeling.Forboth maintain that to permeate things with concepts is insufficient.Both demand, side byside with an ideal-principle of existence, a real principle also.And this with a certainjustification.But since for this so-called real principle, perceiving is our only means ofcomprehension, it follows that mysticism of feeling and philosophy of will are both of theopinion that we have two sources of knowledge: thinking and perceiving, perceivingbeing mediated through feeling and will as individual experience.According tomysticism of feeling and philosophy of will, what flows from the source ofexperience44a cannot be taken up directly into what flows from the source of thinking;therefore the two forms of knowledge, perceiving and thinking, remain standing side byside without a higher mediation.Besides the ideal principle attainable throughknowledge, there is also supposed to exist a real principle which, although it can beexperienced cannot be grasped by thinking.In other words: mysticism of feeling andphilosophy of will are both forms of naive realism; they both adhere to the principle:What is directly perceived is real.Compared with naive realism in its original form, theyare guilty of the further inconsistency of making one definite kind of perceiving (feelingor will) into the one and only means of knowing existence; and this they should not dowhen they adhere in general to the principle: What is perceived is real.According to this,for cognition, external perceptions should have equal value with inner perceptions offeelingPhilosophy of will becomes metaphysical realism when it considers will also to bepresent in those spheres of existence where a direct experience of it, as in one s ownsubject, is not possible.It hypothetically assumes a principle outside the subject, forwhich subjective experience is the sole criterion of reality.The philosophy of will as aform of metaphysical realism is open to the criticism indicated in the preceding chapter; ithas to overcome the contradictory element inherent in every form of metaphysicalrealism, and acknowledge that the will is a universal world process only insofar as itrelates itself ideally to the rest of the world.Addition to the Revised Version, 1918.The reason it is so difficult to observe and graspthe nature of thinking lies in the fact that its nature all too easily eludes the contemplatingsoul, as soon as one tries to focus attention on it.What then is left is something lifeless,abstract, the corpse of living thinking.If this abstract alone is considered, then it is easy,by contrast, to be drawn into the living element in mysticism of feeling, or into themetaphysics of the will, and to find it strange that anyone should expect to grasp thenature of reality in mere thought. But one who really penetrates to the life withinthinking will reach the insight that to experience existence merely in feeling or in willcannot in any way be compared with the inner richness, the inwardly at rest yet at thesame time alive experience, of the life within thinking, and no longer will he say that theother could be ranked above this.It is just because of this richness, because of this innerfullness of living experience, that its reflection in the ordinary life of soul appears lifelessand abstract.No other human soul-activity is so easily underestimated as thinking.Willand feeling warm the human soul even when experienced only in recollection.Thinkingall too easily leaves the soul cold in recollection; the soul-life then appears to have driedout.But this is only the strong shadow cast by its warm luminous reality, which divesdown into the phenomena of the world.This diving down is done by a power that flowswithin the thinking activity itself, the power of spiritual love
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