says,--just as this is our own subjective activity--the true nature of the object.” So can speak only a man who is able to illuminate the life of thought with the light of inner experience. In my _Philosophy of Freedom_ (Berlin, 1894, Verlag Emil Felber), starting from other points of view, I have also pointed out the root-fact of the inner life (p. 46): “It is therefore unquestionable: in our thinking we hold the world-process by one corner, where we must be present, if it is to come about at all. And that is just the very thing we are here concerned with. That is just the reason why things seem to confront me so mysteriously: that I am so without any share in their coming into existence. I simply find them there; in thinking, however, I know how it is done. Hence one can find no more original starting point for a consideration of the world-process than that of thought.” For one who looks thus upon the inner life of man, it is also obvious what is the meaning of human cognition within the whole world-process. It is not a mere empty accompaniment to the rest of the world happenings. It would be such if it represented merely an ideal repetition of what is outwardly present. But in cognition something is accomplished which accomplishes itself nowhere in the outer world: the world-process sets before itself its own spiritual being. The world-process would be to all eternity a mere half-thing, if it did not attain to this confrontation. Therewithal man’s inner experience finds its place in the objective world-process; and without it that process would be incomplete. It is apparent that only the life which is ruled by the inner sense, man’s highest spiritual life in its most proper sense,--it is this life only which can thus raise man above himself. For only in this life does the being of things unveil itself before itself. The matter lies quite differently in regard to the lower perceptive power. For instance, the eye which meditates the seeing of an object is the theatre of a process which, in contrast to the inner life, is exactly like any other external process. My organs are members of the spacial world like other things, and their perceptions are processes in time like any others. Further, their being only appears when they are sunk into the inner life. I thus live a double life; the life of an object among other objects, which lives within its own embodiment and perceives through its organs what lies outside this embodiment; and above this life a higher life, that knows no such inside and outside, that extends, stretching and bridging over both the outside world and itself. I shall therefore be forced to say: at one time I am an individual, a limited “self”; at another time I am a general, universal “Self.” This, too, Paul Asmus has expressed in excellent words (_cp._ his book: _Die indogermanischen Religionen in den Hauptpunkten ihrer Entwickelung_, p. 29 of Vol. I.):