VIII. The Factors of Life

The supposition is, however, untrue. We relate percepts to ourselves not merely ideally, through concepts, but also, as we have already seen, through feeling. We are, therefore, not beings with a merely conceptual content. The Naive Realist holds that the personality actually lives more genuinely in the life of feeling than in the purely ideal element of knowledge. From his point of view he is quite right in interpreting the matter in this way. Feeling signifies on the subjective side exactly the same as percepts signify on the objective side. From the principle of Naive Realism, that everything is real which can be perceived, it follows that feeling is the guarantee of the reality of one's own personality. Monism, however, as here understood, must bestow on feeling the same supplementation which it considers necessary for percepts, if these are to stand before us as complete reality. For this Monism, feeling is an incomplete reality, which, in the form in, which it first appears to us, does not contain as yet its second factor, the concept or Idea. This is why, in actual life, feelings, like percepts, appear prior to knowledge. At first, we have merely a feeling of existence; and it is only in the course of our gradual development, that we attain to the point at which the concept of Self emerges from within the faint feeling of our own existence. However, what for us does not appear until later, is from the first indissolubly bound up with our feeling. This is how the naive man comes to believe that in feeling he grasps existence immediately, in knowledge only mediately. The development of the life of feeling, therefore, appears to him more important than anything else. He will not believe the nexus of the world to have been grasped until he has received it into his feeling. He attempts to make feeling the instrument of knowledge rather than knowing. Now a feeling is entirely individual, something equivalent to a percept. Hence a Philosopher of Feeling makes a world-principle out of something which has significance only within his own personality. He attempts to permeate the whole world with his own Self. What the Monist, in the sense we have described, strives to grasp by means of concepts the Philosopher of Feeling tries to attain through feeling, and he looks on this community of his with the objects as more immediate than knowledge.