The word "feeling" is one of the richest in meanings in philosophic terminology. We have already had occasion to meet with it once, among those used to designate the spirit in its passivity, the matter or content of art, and so as synonym of _impressions._ Once again (and then the meaning was altogether different), we have met with it as designating the _non-logical_ and _non-historical_ character of the æsthetic fact, that is to say, pure intuition, a form of truth which defines no concept and affirms no fact. [Sidenote: _Feeling as activity._] But here it is not regarded in either of these two meanings, nor in the others which have also been conferred upon it to designate other _cognitive_ forms of the spirit, but only in that where feeling is understood as a special activity, of non-cognitive nature, having its two poles, positive and negative, in _pleasure_ and _pain._ This activity has always greatly embarrassed philosophers, who have therefore attempted either to deny it as activity, or to attribute it to _nature,_ excluding it from the spirit. But both these solutions bristle with difficulties of such a kind as to prove them finally unacceptable to any one who examines them with care. For what could a non-spiritual activity ever be, an _activity of nature,_ when we have no other knowledge of activity save as spirituality, nor of spirituality save as activity? Nature is in this case, by definition, the merely passive, inert, mechanical, material. On the other hand, the negation of the character of activity to feeling is energetically disproved by those very poles of pleasure and of pain which appear in it and manifest activity in its concreteness, or, so to say, quivering. [Sidenote: _Identification of feeling with economic activity._] This critical conclusion should place us especially in the greatest embarrassment, for in the sketch of the system of the spirit given above we have left no room for the new activity of which we are now obliged to recognize the existence. But the activity of feeling, if it is activity, is not new. It has already had its place assigned to it in the system that we have sketched, where, however, it has been given another name, _economic_ activity. What is called the activity of feeling is nothing but that more elementary and fundamental practical activity which we have distinguished from the ethical activity and made to consist of the appetition and volition for some individual end, apart from any moral determination.