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CHAPTER III
WHY THE DESIRE FOR KNOWLEDGE
IS FUNDAMENTAL

Desired Knowledge

3.0 Transcending The World Of Phenomena
We search everywhere for what we call the explanation of the facts. We seek something more in things that exceeds what is immediately given to us. This addition we seek splits our whole being into two parts; our objective outer perception and our subjective inner thought-world. We become conscious of contrasting with the world. The universe appears to us as two contrasting sides: Self and World.

3.1 Materialism
The Materialist tries to understand thoughts by regarding them as a purely physical processes. His belief is that thinking takes place in the brain, much like digestion takes place in the animal organs.

3.2 Spiritualism
The Spiritualist denies Matter (the World) and regards it as merely a product of Mind (the Self).

3.3 Realism
If one would really know the external world, one must look outwards and draw on the fund of experience. 

3.4 Idealism
What Fichte has actually accomplished is a magnificent thought-picture of the world, but one without any empirical content.

3.5 Materialistic Idealism
Materialism explains all world phenomena, including our thoughts, to be the product of purely material processes, but, conversely, Matter and its processes are themselves a product of our thinking.

3.6 Indivisible Unity
The third form of Monism sees the indivisible unity of Matter and Mind in even the simplest physical particle.

3.7 Polarity Of Consciousness
We first encounter the basic and original polarity in our own consciousness. We are the ones who detach ourselves from the mother soil of Nature and contrast ourselves with the World as Self.

3.8 Feeling Impulse
It is true that we have estranged ourselves from Nature; but it is equally true that we feel we are within Nature and belong to her. This can only be due to Nature's influence on us, which also lives in us.

3.9 Knowing Nature Within
We can only find Nature outside us after we first know it within us. What corresponds to Nature within us will be our guide. 

3.10 Something More Than “I"
We must come to a point where we can say: Here we are no longer merely 'I', here is something more than 'I'.

3.11 Description Of Consciousness
I have not been concerned with scientific results, but rather with a simple description of what we all experience in our own consciousness. Even those sentences about the attempts to reconcile Mind with the World have only been included to clarify the actual facts. 

3.12 Facts Without Interpretation
My concern is not how science has interpreted consciousness, but rather how we experience it moment by moment.

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CHAPTER IV
THOUGHT AS THE INSTRUMENT
OF KNOWLEDGE

Know Thought

4.0 Reflective Thinking
The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts of the event. I try to add to the occurrence that runs its course without my participation a second process which takes place in the conceptual sphere. This conceptual process depends on me.

4.1 Observation Of Thought
Thought, as an object of observation, differs essentially from all other objects. I observe the table, and I carry on my thinking about the table, but I do not at the same moment observe this thought. While the observation of things and events, and thinking about them, are everyday occurrences filling my ongoing life, observation of the thought itself is a kind of exceptional state.

4.2 Formation Of Concept
I am definitely aware that the concept of a thing is formed by my activity, while the feeling of pleasure is produced in me by an object in the same way as, for example, a change is caused in an object by a stone that falls on it.

4.3 Thinking Contemplation Of Object
While I am reflecting on the object, I am absorbed in it; my attention is turned to it. To become absorbed in the object is to contemplate by thought.

4.4 Thinking Contemplation Of Thought
I can never observe the present thought in which I am actually engaged; only afterward can I make the past experience of my thought process into the object of my present thinking.

4.5 Know Content Of Concept
It is possible to know thought more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Because we produce it ourselves we know the characteristic features of its course and the details of how the process takes place.

4.6 Guided By Content Of Thought
What I observe in studying a thought process is not which process in my brain connects the concept lightning with the concept thunder, but my reason for bringing these two concepts into a specific relationship. Introspection shows that in linking thought with thought I am guided by the content of my thoughts; I am not guided by any physical processes in my brain. Many people today find it difficult to grasp the concept of pure thinking.

4.7 I Exist As Content Of Thought Activity
My investigation reaches firm ground only when I find an object from that I can derive the meaning of its existence from the object itself. This I am, as a thinker; for I give to my existence the definite, self-determined content of my thought-activity. From here I can go on to ask whether other things exist in the same or in some other way.

4.8 Remain Within Thought
When I observe my own thought what hovers in the background is nothing but thought. I can remain within the realm of thought.

4.9 Creation Before Knowing
What is impossible with Nature ---creation before knowing--- we achieve with thinking. If we refrain from thinking until we have first gained knowledge of it, then we would never think at all. We must resolutely think straight ahead and only afterward by introspective analysis gain knowledge of what we have done. We ourselves first create the object that we are to observe. 

4.10 Self-Supporting Thought
Thought is self-supporting, not dependent on anything else. In thought we have the principle of self-subsistence. Thought can be grasped by thought itself.

4.11 Impartial Consideration Of Thought
We must first consider thinking in an impartial way, without reference to either a thinking subject or conceived object. Before anything else can be understood, thought must be understood.

4.12 Thought Is A Fact
Thought is a fact, and it is meaningless to speak of the correctness or falsehood of a fact. At most I can have doubts about whether thought is correctly applied.

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CHAPTER V
THE WORLD AS PERCEPT

Reactive Thought

5-0 Reactive Thinking
When we see a tree, our thinking reacts to our observation; a conceptual element comes to the object, and we consider the object and the conceptual counterpart as belonging together. Concepts are added to observation. 

5.1 Conceptual Search
I first search for the concept that fits my observation. Someone who does not reflect further, observes, and is content to leave it at that. I can never gain the concept by mere observation, no matter how many cases I may observe. 

5.2 Conceptual Reference
When I as thinking subject, refer a concept to an object, we must not regard this reference as something purely subjective. It is not the subject that makes the reference, but thinking.

5.3 Conceptual Relationship
Thinking is able to draw threads from one element of observation to another. It connects specific concepts with these elements and in this way brings them into a relationship with each other.

5.4 Correction Of My Picture Of World
Every broadening of the circle of my perceptions compels me to correct the picture I have of the world. We see this in everyday life, as well as in the intellectual development of humankind.

5.5 Mathematical And Qualitative Percept-Picture
I should like to call the dependence of my perception-picture on my place of observation, "mathematical", and its dependence on my organization, "qualitative." The first determines the proportions of size and mutual distances of my perceptions, the second their quality.

5.6 Subjective Percept-Picture
The recognition of the subjective character of our perceptions can lead to doubt whether anything objective underlies them. From this point of view, nothing is left of the perception when we take away the act of perceiving.

5.7 Mental Picture: After-effect Of Observation
When the tree disappears from my field of vision, an after-effect remains in my consciousness: a picture of the tree. This element I call my mental picture, my representation of the tree.

5.8 Mental Picture: Caused By Unknown Thing-In-Itself
The Kantian view limits our knowledge of the world to our mental pictures, not because it is convinced that nothing can exist beyond these mental pictures, but rather it believes us to be so organized that we can only experience the change in our own Self, not the thing-in-itself that causes this change.

5.9 Mental Picture: What My Organization Transmits
Physics, Physiology, and Psychology seem to teach that our organization is necessary for our perceptions, and that, consequently, we can know nothing except what our organization transmits to us from the things.

5.10 Perceived World Is A Projection Of Soul
All of the qualities that we perceive in the world are the product of the soul and transferred to the external world.

5.11 External Perception Is Mental Picture
I must consider the table, —which I used to believe had an effect on me and produced a mental picture of itself in me— as being itself a mental picture. If everything is a mental picture then they could have no effect on each other.

5.12 Own Organism Is A Mental Picture
He would, to be consistent, have to regard his own organism also as a complex of mental pictures. But this removes the possibility of regarding the content of the perceptual world as a product of the mind's organization. Only my real eye could have the mental pictures "sun" and "earth".

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CHAPTER VI
OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD

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CHAPTER VII
HUMAN INDIVIDUALITY

Individualized Concept

7.0 Corresponding Concept Relates “I” To The World
I am really identical with the objects; not, however, "I" in so far as I am a perception of myself as subject, but "I" in so far as I am a part of the universal world process. I can discover the common element in both (percept and self) , so far as they are complementary aspects of the world, only through thought which by means of concepts relates the one to the other.

7.1 Perception Of Motion
Just as we can say that the eye perceives a mechanical process of motion in its surroundings as light, so we can affirm that every change in an object, determined by natural law, is perceived by us as a process of motion.

7.2 Mental Picture: Intuition Related To A Percept
The moment a percept appears in my field of observation, thinking also becomes active through me. An element of my thought system, a definite intuition, a concept, connects itself with the percept.

7.3 Mental Picture: Individualized Concept
The full reality of a thing is given to us in the moment of observation through the fitting together of concept and percept. By means of a percept, the concept acquires an individualized form, a relationship to this particular perception.

7.4 Mental Picture: Acquired Experience
The sum of those things about which I can form mental pictures may be called my total experience.

7.5 Mental Picture: Subjective Representation Of Reality
Reality presents itself to us as the union of percept and concept; and the subjective representation of this reality presents itself to us as mental picture.

7.6 Individual Ego: Pleasure And Pain
We are not satisfied merely to refer the percept, by means of thinking, to the concept, but we relate them also to our particular subjectivity, our individual Ego. The expression of this individual relationship is feeling, which manifests itself as pleasure or displeasure.

7.7 Two-Fold Nature: Thinking And Feeling
Thinking is the element through which we take part in the universal cosmic process; feeling is that through which we can withdraw ourselves into the narrow confines of our own being.

7.8 True Individuality
A true individuality will be those who reach up with their feelings to the farthest possible extent into the region of the ideal.

7.9 Forming Mental Pictures
Making mental pictures gives our conceptual life at once an individual stamp.

7.10 Intensity Of Feelings
Each of us combines special feelings, and these in the most varying degrees of intensity, with our perceptions.

7.11 Education Of Feelings
Knowledge of things will go hand in hand with the development and education of the life of feeling.

7.12 Living Concepts
Feeling is the means whereby, in the first instance, concepts gain concrete life.

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CHAPTER VIII
ARE THERE ANY LIMITS TO COGNITION?

Cognitive Unity

8.0 Cognition
It is due, as we have seen, to our organization that the full, complete reality, including our own selves as subjects, appears at first as a duality. Cognition overcomes this duality by fusing the two elements of reality, the percept and the concept gained by thinking, into the complete thing.

8.1 Assumed World Principle and Experience
It is quite natural that a dualistic thinker should be unable to find the connection between the world principle which he hypothetically assumes and the things given in experience.

8.2 Ego-hood's Questions and Answers
It is not the world which sets us the questions, but we ourselves. Only when the Ego-hood has taken the two elements of reality which are indivisibly united in the world and has combined them also for itself, is cognitive satisfaction attained

8.3 Reconcile Familiar Percepts and Concepts
Our cognition is concerned with questions which arise for us through the fact that a sphere of percepts, conditioned by place, time, and our subjective organization, is confronted by a sphere of concepts pointing to the totality of the universe. My task consists in reconciling these two spheres, with both of which I am well acquainted.

8.4 Conceptual Representation Of Objective Reality
We can obtain only conceptual representatives of the objectively real.

8.5 Real Principles in addition to Ideal Principles
The ideal principles which thinking discovers seem too airy for the dualist, and he seeks, in addition, real principles with which to support them.

8.6 Real Evidence of Senses in addition to Ideal Evidence
The naïve person demands the real evidence of his senses in addition to the ideal evidence of his thinking.

8.7 Vanishing Perceptions and Ideal Entities
Its realities arise and perish, while what it regards as unreal, in contrast with the real, persists. Hence naïve realism is compelled to acknowledge, in addition to percepts, the existence of something ideal. It must admit entities which cannot be perceived by the senses.

8.8 Perceptible Reality and Imperceptible Reality
Metaphysical realism constructs, in addition to the perceptible reality, an imperceptible reality which it conceives on the analogy of the perceptible one.

8.9 Sum of Perceptions and Laws of Nature
If we reject the untenable part of metaphysical realism, the world presents itself to us as the sum of percepts and their conceptual (ideal) relationships. Monism combines one-sided realism with idealism into a higher unity.

8.10 Separation and Reunion of “I” into World Continuum
Bridging over the antithesis can take place only in the quite specific way that is characteristic of the particular human subject. As soon as the I, which is separated from the world in the act of perceiving, fits itself back into the world continuum through thoughtful contemplation, all further questioning ceases, having been but a consequence of the separation.

8.11 Sum of Effects and Underlying Causes
This is an inference from a sum of effects to the character of the underlying causes. We believe that we can understand the situation well enough from a sufficiently large number of instances to know how the inferred causes will behave in other instances. Such an inference is called an inductive inference.

8.12 Subjective and Objective World Continuum
Through considerations of the process of cognition he is convinced of the existence of an objectively real world continuum, over and above the "subjective" world continuum which is cognizable through percepts and concepts. The nature of this reality he thinks he can determine by inductive inferences from his percepts.

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CHAPTER IX
THE FACTORS OF LIFE

9.0 Cognitive Being
If we call the establishment of such a thought connection an "act of cognition", and the resulting condition of ourself "knowledge", then, assuming the above supposition to be true, we should have to consider ourselves as beings who merely cognize or know.

9.1 Life Of Feeling
The Naïve Realist holds that the personality actually lives more genuinely in the life of feeling than in the purely ideal element of knowledge.

9.2 Perception of Feeling
To begin with, feeling is exactly the same, on the subjective side, as the perception is on the objective side.

9.3 Incomplete Feeling
Feeling is an incomplete reality, which, in the form in which it first appears to us, does not yet contain its second factor, the concept or idea.

9.4 Feeling Of Existence
The concept of self emerges from within the dim feeling of our own existence. 

9.5 Cultivation Of Feeling
The cultivation of the life of feeling appears more important than anything else.

9.6 Feeling Knowledge
Attempts to make feeling, rather than knowing, the instrument of knowledge.

9.7 Philosopher Of Feeling
Makes a universal principle out of something that has significance only within one's own personality.

9.8 Mysticism Of Feeling
Wants to raise feeling, which is individual, into a universal principle.

9.9 Willing
The individual relation of our self to what is objective. 

9.10 Philosophy Of Will
The will becomes the world-principle of reality.

9.11 Real Experience Of Feeling and Willing
Besides the ideal principle which is accessible to knowledge, there is said to be a real principle which cannot be apprehended by thinking but can yet be experienced in feeling and willing.

9.12 Universal Will
The will as a universal world-process.

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CHAPTER X
THE IDEA OF FREEDOM

10.0 Self-Supported Being
When we observe our thinking, we live during this observation directly within a self-supporting, spiritual web of being. Intuition is the conscious experience -- in pure spirit -- of a purely spiritual content. Only through an intuition can the essence of thinking be grasped.

10.1 Psyche-Physical Organization
The psyche-physical organization contributes nothing to the essential nature of thinking, but recedes whenever the activity of thinking makes its appearance; it suspends its own activity, it yields ground; and on the ground thus left empty, the thinking appears.

10.2 Ego-Consciousness
The "I" is to be found within the thinking; the "ego-consciousness" arises through the traces which the activity of thinking engraves upon our general consciousness.

10.3 Characterological Disposition
The characterological disposition is formed by the more or less permanent content of our subjective life, that is, by the content of our mental pictures and feelings. It is determined especially by my life of feeling. 

10.4 Levels Of Morality
The conceptual factor, or motive, is the momentary determining factor of the will; the driving force is the permanent determining factor of the individual. The levels of driving force are: instinct, feelings, thinking and forming mental pictures, and conceptual thinking. The levels of motive are egoism, moral authority, moral insight, and conceptual intuition.

10.5 Moral Intuition
Among the levels of characterological disposition, we have singled out as the highest the one that works as pure thinking or practical reason. Among the motives, we have singled out conceptual intuition as the highest. On closer inspection it will at once be seen that at this level of morality driving force and motive coincide.

10.6 Moral Motive
How can an action be individually made to fit the special case and the special situation, and yet at the same time be determined by intuition in a purely ideal way? This objection rests upon a confusion of the moral motive with the perceptible content of an action. Of course, my "I" takes notice of these perceptual contents, but it does not allow itself to be determined by them. 

10.7 Ethical Individualism
The sum of ideas which are effective in us, the concrete content of our intuitions, constitutes what is individual in each of us. To let this content express itself in life is both the highest moral driving force and the highest motive a man can have. We may call this point of view ethical individualism.

10.8 Love Of Action
While I am performing the action I am influenced by a moral maxim in so far as it can live in me intuitively; it is bound up with my love for the objective that I want to realize through my action. I do not work out mentally whether my action is good or bad; I carry it out because I love it.

10.9 Character Of Will
If we want to understand the nature of the human will, we must distinguish between the path which leads this will to a certain degree of development and the unique character which the will assumes as it approaches this goal. On the path towards this goal the standards play their rightful part.

10.10 Harmony Of Intentions
I differ from my fellow man, not at all because we are living in two entirely different spiritual worlds, but because from the world of ideas common to us both we receive different intuitions. The free man lives in confidence that he and any other free man belong to one spiritual world, and that their intentions will harmonize.

10.11 Concept of the Free Human Being
There are many who will say that the concept of the free man which I have here developed is a chimera nowhere to be found in practice. Yet in each of us there dwells a deeper being in which the free man finds expression.

10.12 Moral World Order
The human individual is the source of all morality and the centre of earthly life. State and society exist only because they have arisen as a necessary consequence of the life of individuals. The individual would become stunted if he led an isolated existence outside human society. Indeed, this is just why the social order arises, so that it may in turn react favorably upon the individual.

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CHAPTER XII
WORLD-PURPOSE AND LIFE-PURPOSE

(THE DESTINY OF MAN)

12.0 Concept Of Purpose
Overcoming of the concept of purpose in spheres where it does not belong. 

12.1 Percept Cause Precedes Percept Effect
The percept of the cause precedes the percept of the effect.

12.2 Conceptual Factor Of Effect
If the effect is to have a real influence upon the cause, it can do so only by means of the conceptual factor. 

12.3 Real Influence Of Concept (Action)
A perceptible influence of a concept upon something else is to be observed only in human actions.

12.4 Ideal Connections In Nature
The naïve man knows how he brings an event about and from this he concludes that nature will do it in the same way. In the connections of nature which are purely ideal he finds not only invisible forces but also invisible real purposes.

12.5 Laws Of Nature
Monism looks for laws of nature, but not for purposes of nature.

12.6 Purposes Of Life
Nothing is purposeful except what the human being has first made so, for purposefulness arises only through the realization of an idea.

12.7 Human Destiny
My mission in the world is not predetermined, but is at every moment the one I choose for myself. 

12.8 Embodiment Of Ideas
Ideas are realized purposefully only by human beings. Consequently it is not permissible to speak of the embodiment of ideas by history.

12.9 Formative Principle
The formative principle of the totality of nature unfolds and organizes itself.

12.10 Teleology
The theory of purpose maintains that  there is a high degree of purpose and plan unmistakably present in the formations and developments of nature.

12.11 Coherence Within Whole
The systematic coherence of the parts of a perceptual whole is simply the ideal coherence of the parts of an ideal whole contained in this perceptual whole.

12.12 Cosmic Being
Wherever there is a systematic linking of cause and effect for our perception, the dualist may assume that we see only the carbon copy of a connection in which the absolute cosmic Being has realized its purposes.

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CHAPTER XIII
MORAL IMAGINATION

(DARWINISM AND MORALITY)

13.0 Selection Of Ethical Idea
A free spirit acts according to his impulses, that is, according to intuitions selected from the totality of his world of ideas by thinking. For an unfree spirit, the reason why he singles out a particular intuition from his world of ideas in order to make it the basis of an action, lies in the world of percepts given to him, that is, in his past experiences.

13.1 Concrete Mental Picture
Whenever the impulse for an action is present in a general conceptual form (for example, Thou shalt do good to thy fellow men! Thou shalt live so that thou best promotest thy welfare!) then for each particular case the concrete mental picture of the action must first be found.

13.2 Moral Imagination
The human being produces concrete mental pictures from the sum of his ideas chiefly by means of the imagination. Therefore what the free spirit needs in order to realize his ideas, in order to be effective, is moral imagination.

13.3 Moral Technique
Moral action, in addition to the faculty of having moral ideas (moral intuition) and moral imagination, is the ability to transform the world of percepts without violating the natural laws by which these are connected. This ability is moral technique. It can be learnt in the same sense in which any kind of knowledge can be learnt.

13.4 History Of Moral Ideas
Moral imagination can become objects of knowledge only after they have been produced by the individual. We therefore deal with them as with a natural history of moral ideas.

13.5 Normative Moral Laws
Some people have wanted to maintain the standard-setting (normative) character of moral laws. As a moral being, I am an individual and have laws of my very own.

13.6 Traditional Moral Doctrines
But can we not then make the old a measure for the new? Is not every man compelled to measure the products of his moral imagination by the standard of traditional moral doctrines?

13.7 Ancestral Moral Ideas
However true it is that the moral ideas of the individual have perceptibly developed out of those of his ancestors, it is equally true that the individual is morally barren unless he has moral ideas of his own.

13.8 Supernatural Influence
Monism cannot admit that the moral nature of will is completely accounted for by being traced back to a continuous supernatural influence upon moral life. What happens to man, and in man, through this, becomes a moral element only when, in human experience, it becomes an individual's own.

13.9 Characterization Of Action
The characterizing of an action, whether it is a free one, he must leave to the immediate observation of the action.

13.10 Action Feels Free
If a human being finds that an action is the image of such an ideal intuition, then he feels it to be free. In this characteristic of an action lies its freedom.

13.11 Freedom To Determine Motives
To be free means to be able of one's own accord to determine by moral imagination those mental pictures (motives) which underlie the action. A free being is one who can want what he himself considers right.

13.12 Submission To Others Motives
Not until they would enslave my spirit, drive my motives out of my head, and put their own motives in the place of mine, do they really aim at making me unfree.

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CHAPTER XIV
THE VALUE OF LIFE

(OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM)

14.0 Optimist or Pessimist?
One view says that this world is the best that could conceivably exist, and that to live and to act in it is a blessing of untold value. The other view maintains that life is full of misery and want; everywhere pain outweighs pleasure, sorrow outweighs joy. 

14.1 Best Possible World (cooperative participation)
The world is the best of all possible worlds. A better world is impossible for God is good and wise. From this optimistic standpoint, then, life is worth living. It must stimulate us to co-operative participation.

14.2 Pain Of Striving (universal idleness)
Eternal striving, ceaseless craving for satisfaction which is ever beyond reach, this is the fundamental characteristic of all active will. For no sooner is one goal attained, than a fresh need springs up, and so on. Schopenhauer's pessimism leads to complete inactivity; his moral aim is universal idleness.

14.3 Pain Outweighs Pleasure (unselfish service)
The human being has to permeate his whole being with the recognition that the pursuit of individual satisfaction (egoism) is a folly, and that he ought to be guided solely by the task of dedicating himself to the progress of the world. Hartmann's pessimism leads us to activity devoted to a sublime task.

14.4 Pleasure Of Striving (future goal)
Striving (desiring) in itself gives pleasure. Who does not know the enjoyment given by the hope of a remote but intensely desired goal?

14.5 Quantity Of Pleasure (rational estimation of feeling)
What is the right method for comparing the sum of pleasure to pain? Eduard von Hartmann believes that it is reason that holds the scales.

14.6 Quality Of Pleasure (critical examination of feeling)
If we strike out feelings from the pleasure side of the balance on the ground that they are attached to objects which turn out to have been illusory, we make the value of life dependent not on the quantity but on the quality of pleasure, and this, in turn, on the value of the objects which cause the pleasure.

14.7 Pursuit Of Pleasure (hopelessness of egotism)
If the quantity of pain in a person's life became at any time so great that no hope of future pleasure (credit) could help him to get over the pain, then the bankruptcy of life's business would inevitably follow.

14.8 Value Of Pleasure (satisfaction of needs)
The magnitude of pleasure is related to the degree of my need. If I am hungry enough for two pieces of bread and can only get one, the pleasure I derive from it had only half the value it would have had if the eating of it has satisfied my hunger.

14.9 Will For Pleasure (intensity of desire for goal)
The question is not at all whether there is a surplus of pleasure or of pain, but whether the will for pleasure is strong enough to overcome the pain.

14.10 Magnitude Of Pleasure (amusement)
If it is only a question whether, after the day's work, I am to amuse myself by a game or by light conversation, and if I am totally indifferent to what I do as long as it serves the purpose, then I simply ask myself: What gives me the greatest surplus of pleasure?

14.11 Highest Pleasure (realization of ethical ideal)
Moral ideals spring from the moral imagination of man. They are his intuitions, the driving forces which his spirit harnesses; he wants them, because their realization is his highest pleasure.

14.12 Joy Of Achievement (measure achievement against aims)
He acts as he wants to act, that is, in accordance with the standard of his ethical intuitions; and he finds in the achievement of what he wants the true enjoyment of life. He determines the value of life by measuring achievements against aims.

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CHAPTER XV
THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GENUS

15.0 Group Member
A person bears the general characteristics of the groups to which he belongs.

15.1 Group Characteristics
If we ask why some particular thing about a person is like this or like that, we are referred back from the individual to the genus.

15.2 Generic Medium For Individual Expression
A man develops qualities and activities of his own, and the basis for these we can seek only in the man himself. What is generic in him serves only as a medium in which to express his own individual being.

15.3 Individual Capacities And Inclinations
A man's activity in life is governed by his individual capacities and inclinations, whereas a woman's is supposed to be determined solely by the mere fact that she is a woman.

15.4 Individual Social Decision
What a woman, within her natural limitations, wants to become had better be left to the woman herself to decide.

15.5 Unique Characteristics
Determining the individual according to the laws of his genus ceases where the sphere of freedom (in thinking and acting) begins.

15.6 Intuitive Conceptual Content
The conceptual content which man has to connect with the percept by an act of thinking in order to have the full reality cannot be fixed once and for all and bequeathed ready-made to mankind. The individual must get his concepts through his own intuition.

15.7 Individual Concrete Aims
It is not possible to determine from the general characteristics of man what concrete aims the individual may choose to set himself.

15.8 Individual View And Action
And every kind of study that deals with abstract thoughts and generic concepts is but a preparation for the knowledge we get when a human individuality tells us his way of viewing the world, and for the knowledge we get from the content of his acts of will.

15.9 Emancipation Of Knowing
If we are to understand a free individuality we must take over into our own spirit those concepts by which he determines himself, in their pure form (without mixing our own conceptual content with them).

15.10 Emancipation Of Being
Only to the extent that a man has emancipated himself in this way from all that is generic, does he count as a free spirit within a human community.

15.11 Intuitive Conduct
Only that part of his conduct that springs from his intuitions can have ethical value in the true sense.

15.12 Acceptance By Communities
It is from individual ethical intuitions and their acceptance by human communities that all moral activity of mankind originates.