Several epistemological tendencies in recent speculation have joined in creating this problem. But it is possible to attain to clearness about it by surveying the situation from the point of view of spiritual perception which underlies the exposition of this book. What is it that, in the first instance, I have before me when I confront another person? To begin with, there is the sensuous appearance of the other's body, as given in perception. To this we might add the auditory perception of what he is saying, and so forth. All this I apprehend, not with a passive stare, but by the activity of my thinking which is set in motion. Through the thinking with which I now confront the other person, the percept of him becomes, as it were, psychically transparent. As my thinking apprehends the percept, I am compelled to judge that what I perceive is really quite other than it appears to the outer senses. The sensuous appearance, in being what it immediately is, reveals something else which it is mediately. In presenting itself to me as a distinct object, it, at the same time, extinguishes itself as a mere sensuous appearance. But in thus extinguishing itself it reveals a character which, so long as it affects me, compels me as a thinking being to extinguish my own thinking and to put its thinking in the place of mine. Its thinking is then apprehended by my thinking as an experience like my own. Thus I have really perceived another's thinking. For the immediate percept, in extinguishing itself as sensuous appearance, is apprehended by my thinking. It is a profess which passes wholly in my consciousness and consists in this, that the other's thinking takes the place of my thinking. The self-extinction of the sensuous appearance actually abolishes the separation between the spheres of the two consciousnesses. In my own consciousness this fusion manifests itself in that, so long as I experience the contents of the other's consciousness, I am aware of my own consciousness as little as I am aware of it in dreamless sleep. Just as my waking consciousness is eliminated from the latter, so are the contents of my own consciousness eliminated from my perception of the contents of another's consciousness. Two things tend to deceive us about the true facts. The first is that, in perceiving another person, the extinction of the contents of one's own consciousness is replaced not, as in sleep, by unconsciousness, but by the contents of the other's consciousness. The other is that my consciousness of my own self oscillates so rapidly between extinction and recurrence, that these alternations usually escape observation. The whole problem is to be solved, not through artificial construction of concepts, involving an inference from what is in consciousness to what always must transcend consciousness, but through genuine experience of the connection between thinking and perceiving. The same remark applies to many other problems which appear in philosophical literature.