VI. The Human Individuality

Our life is a continual oscillation between our living with the universal world process and our own individual existence. The further we ascend into the universal nature of thinking where what is individual ultimately interests us only as example, as instance of the concept, the more the character of the quite definite individual personality is lost within us. The further we descend into the depths of our own soul life and let our feelings resound with the experiences of the outer world, the more we cut ourselves off from universal life. A true individuality will be one who reaches up with his feelings farthest into the region of the ideal. There are people in whom even the most general ideas that enter their heads bear, nevertheless, that particular coloring which shows unmistakably their connection with the individual who thinks them. There are others whose concepts come before us without the least trace of individual coloring, as if they had not been produced by a being of flesh and blood at all.