VI. The Human Individuality

Our thinking unites us with the world; our feeling leads us back into ourselves, first makes us into an individual. If we were merely thinking and perceiving beings, our whole life would have to flow in unvarying indifference. If we could merely know ourselves as self, we would be completely indifferent to ourselves. Only through the fact that we experience a feeling of self along with self-knowledge, and pleasure and pain along with our perceptions of things, do we live as individual beings, whose existence is not limited to the conceptual relationship in which they stand to the rest of the world, but who also have a particular value for themselves.