In such wise the inner being of man obtains light not only as regards itself but also as regards external things. From this point of view an endless perspective opens out before man’s knowledge. Within him shines a light whose illumination is not restricted to that which is within him. It is a sun which lights up all reality at once. Something makes its appearance in us which links us with the whole world. No longer are we simply isolated, chance human beings, no longer this or that individual. The entire world reveals itself in us. It unveils to us its own coherence; and it unveils to us how we ourselves as individuals are bound up with it. From out of self-knowledge is born knowledge of the world. And our own limited individuality merges itself spiritually into the great interconnected world-whole, because in us something has come to life that reaches out beyond this individuality, that embraces along with it everything of which this individuality forms a part. Thinking which does not block up its own road to inner experience with logical preconceptions always comes, in the long run, to a recognition of the entity that rules in us and connects us with the entire world, because through this entity we overcome the opposition of “inner” and “outer” in regard to man. Paul Asmus, the keen-sighted philosopher, who died young, expressed himself as follows about this position (_cp._ his book _Das Ich und das Ding an Sich_, p. 14 _et seq._):--“Let us make it clear by an example: imagine a piece of sugar; it is square, sweet, impenetrable, etc., etc., these are one and all qualities which we understand; one thing, however, hovers before us as something totally different, that we do not understand, that is so different from ourselves that we cannot penetrate into it without losing ourselves; from the mere surface of which thought starts back afraid. This one thing is the unknown bearer of all these qualities; the thing-in-itself, which constitutes the inmost self of the object. Thus Hegel rightly says that the entire content of our perception is related as mere accident to this obscure subject, while we, without penetrating into its depths, merely attach determinations to what it is in itself,--which ultimately, since we do not know the thing itself, remain merely subjective and have no objective value. Conceptual thought, on the other hand, has no such unknowable subject, whose determinations might be mere accidents, but the objective subject falls within the concept. If I cognise anything, then it is present in its entire fulness in my conception; I am at home in the inmost shrine of its being, not because it has no proper being-in-itself of its own, but because it compels me to re-think its concept, in virtue of that necessity of the concept which hovers over us both and appears subjectively in me and objectively in the concept itself. Through this re-thinking there reveals itself to us at the same time, as Hegel