The Factors of Life 129fundamental proposition of naive realism (everything
that can be perceived is real), feeling guarantees the real-
ity of one’s own personality. Yet monism, as understood
here, must acknowledge that a feeling, if it is to appear to
us in its full reality, requires the same kind of completion
as any other percept. For monism, feeling is an incom-
plete reality that, in the form in which it is given to us at
first, does not yet contain its second factor, the concept
or idea. This is why feeling, like perceiving, always ap-
pearsbefore cognizing. First, we merely feel ourselves as
existing; and, in the course of our gradual development,
we reach the point at which, out of our own dimly felt ex-
istence, the self concept dawns upon us. But what emerg-
esfor us only later is originally inseparably united with
feeling. This is what makes naive persons believe that ex-
istence reveals itself directly in feeling, but only indirect-
ly in knowledge. Exercising the life of feeling will
therefore seem more important to them than anything
else. They believe themselves to have grasped the pattern
of the universe only when they have received it into their
feeling. They try to make feeling, not knowing, the
means of cognition. Since feeling is something altogether
individual, something equivalent to perception, philoso-
phers of feeling make something that has significance
only within their own personality into the principle of the
universe. They try to permeate the entire universe with
their own selves. What monism, as described in this
book, attempts to graspconceptually, the philosophers of
feeling seek to achieve with feeling. They see that kind
of connection with things as more immediate.