VI. The Human Individuality

Our thinking unites us with the world; our feeling leads us back into ourselves, and this makes us individuals. If we were merely thinking and perceiving beings, our whole life would flow along in monotonous indifference. If we could only cognize ourself as a self, we would be totally indifferent to ourself. Only because with self-knowledge we experience self-feeling, and with the perception of objects pleasure and pain, do we live as individual beings whose existence is not exhausted by the conceptual relations in which we stand to the rest of the world, but who have a special value for themselves as well.