VI. Human Individuality

The sum of those things about which I can form representations may be called my experience. The man who has the greater number of individualized concepts will be the man of richer experience. A man who lacks all power of intuition is not capable of acquiring experience. The objects simply disappear again from his field of vision, because he lacks the concepts which he ought to bring into relation with them. On the other hand, a man whose faculty of thinking is well developed, but whose perception functions badly owing to his clumsy sense-organs, will be no better able to gather experience. He can, it is true, by one means and another acquire concepts; but his intuitions lack the vivid reference to definite things. The unthinking traveler and the scholar living in abstract conceptual systems are alike incapable of acquiring a rich experience.