Freedom-Philosophy and Monism 171and who do not give intuition its full weight, what is
claimed here as a reality remains “mere contradiction.”
For those who understand how ideas are intuitively expe-
riencedas a kind of self-sufficient essence, it is clear that,
when we cognize in the world of ideas, we live our way
into something that is the same for all human beings; but
that, when we borrow intuitions from that world of ideas
for our acts of will, we individualize an element of that
worldthrough the same activity that we develop in the
spiritual-conceptual process of cognition as something
universally human. What appears as a logical contradic-
tion—the universal formation of cognitive ideas and the
individual formation of ethical ideas—becomes, when it
is beheld in its reality, a living concept. Here lies some-
thing characteristic of the human entity: what can be
grasped intuitively in the human being moves back and
forth, as in a living pendulum, between universally valid
cognition and individual experience of the universal. For
those who cannot see one half of the pendulum’s move-
ment in its reality, thinking remains a merely subjective
human activity; for those who cannot grasp the other, all
individual life seems lost in the human activity of think-
ing. For a thinker of the first kind, cognition is an unintel-
ligible fact; for the other, moral life. Both will contribute
inadequate notions of all kinds to the explanation of one
or the other, either because they do not actually grasp that
thinking can be experienced, or because they misunder-
stand it as a merely abstracting activity.
- Materialism is mentioned on pages 164 –65. I am
well aware that there are thinkers — such as Ziehen,