The entire course of man’s development is to be apprehended as a surging back by degrees upon himself, a “re-flecting” in the most literal sense of the word. Man is the “reflecting” living being, the word being understood as well in its physical as in its psychical sense. The whole process of development from infant to adult is a gradual becoming acquainted with himself. Disgust, shame, are as yet unknown to the infant. These are evolved only as phenomena of “reflection,” as a wave of experience running back upon the individual himself, and finding its conclusion in the matured self-consciousness. This self, however, is the stationary wave; at every moment the same and yet another; the--for me--_immediately certain_, as which it presents itself in consciousness; the--for others--not present at all. In the foregoing it has been shown that both these varieties of attempts at world-conceptions, as well that based upon the concept of _substans_ as that which takes the whole play of world-events for pure relation-values, thereby deprive their own selves of the possibility of existence, since from both points of view a world of concepts never could come to be. The Buddha solves the problem by pointing out that there is no such thing as a world of concepts; in the _I_-world, however, the world itself and the world _as such_--the real world and the world of ideation--merge into one in the interference “self-consciousness.” And this is the answer to the question, “How must the world be fashioned to render possible the fact that it is present _as such_?” * * * * * The insight into the essential nature of self-consciousness is _the_ intuition. The value of an intuition is to be judged by what it accomplishes as a working hypothesis. What does the Buddha-thought accomplish here? The answer is:-- It clears up the whole relationship of mental life towards the concept of _substans_. Every consistent application of the laws of thought seems perforce to conduct to an “unconditioned constant” situated at the root of things, lying, however, beyond all possibility of demonstration. In this matter three positions are conceivable:-- 1. The position of faith which sees in this the proof of an imperceptible to sense in itself--an absolute. 2. The position of science which sees in this a consequence of the imaginative faculty. Its ally is philosophical scepticism--or rather, criticism, chiefly as represented by Hume.