VI. Human Individuality

Philosophers have found the chief difficulty in the explanation of representations in the fact that we are not the things themselves, and yet our representations must have a form corresponding to the things. But on closer inspection it turns out that this difficulty does not really exist. We certainly are not the external things, but we belong together with them to one and the same world. The stream of the universal cosmic process passes through that segment of the world which, to my perception, is myself as subject. So far as my perception goes, I am, in the first instance, confined within the limits bounded by my skin. But all that is contained within the skin belongs to the cosmos as a whole. Hence, for a relation to subsist between my organism and an object external to me, it is by no means necessary that something of the object should slip into me, or make an impression on my spirit, like a signet ring on wax. The question—How do I gain knowledge of that tree ten feet away from me—is utterly misleading. It springs from the view that the boundaries of my body are absolute barriers, through which information about things filters into me. The forces which are active within the limit of my body are the same as those which exist outside. I am, therefore, really the things, not, however, I in so far as I am subject of perception, but I in so far as I am a part within the universal world-process. The percept of the tree belongs to the same whole as my I. This universal world process produces alike, there the percept of the tree, and here the percept of my I. Were I a world-creator instead of a world-knower, object and subject (percept and I) would originate in one act. For they condition one another reciprocally. As world-knower I can discover the common element in both, so far as they are complementary aspects of the world, only through thinking which by means of concepts relates the one to the other.