128 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
achieved through self-perception conceptually, just as it
determines all other percepts. It places this as the subject
or “I” over against objects. This “something” is thinking,
and the conceptual determinates are concepts and ideas.
Thus, thinking first expresses itself in the percept of the
self, but it is not merely subjective, for the self character-
izes itself as subject only with the help of thinking. Such
self-reference in thought is one way that we determine our
personality in life. Through it, we lead a purely conceptual
existence. Through it, we feel ourselves as thinking be-
ings. Were it unaccompanied by other ways of determin-
ing our self, this determination of our personality would
remain purely conceptual (logical). Then we would be be-
ings whose lives were limited to establishing purely con-
ceptual relationships among percepts, and between
percepts and ourselves. Now, if we call the establishment
of such a relationship in thoughtcognition, and the state of
the self achieved through itknowledge, then—if the as-
sumption just mentioned applied—we would have to re-
gard ourselves asmerely cognizing or knowing beings.
But this assumption does not hold. As we have seen,
we do not relate percepts to ourselves only through con-
cepts, but also through feeling. Therefore we are not be-
ings with merely conceptual content to our lives. The
naive realist, in fact, sees in the feeling-life amore real
expression of the personality than in the purely concep-
tual element of knowledge. And if the matter is judged
from that standpoint, this view is quite correct. At first,
feeling is exactly similar on the subjective side to the per-
cept on the objective side. Therefore, according to the
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