VI. Human Individuality

Our life is a continual oscillation between our living with the universal world-process and our own individual existence. The farther we ascend into the universal nature of thinking where the individual, at last, interests us only as an example, an instance, of the concept, the more the character of the particular Being, of the quite determinate, single personality, becomes lost in us. The farther we descend into the depths of our own life and allow our feelings to resound with our experiences of the outer world, the more we cut ourselves off from the universal life. True individuality belongs to him who reaches up with his feelings to the farthest possible extent into the region of the ideal. There are men in whom even the most general Ideas still bear that peculiar personal tinge which shows unmistakably their connection with their author. There are others whose concepts come before us as devoid of any trace of individual colouring as if they had not been produced by a being of flesh and blood at all.