In forming a judgment about the argument of the two preceding chapters,
a difficulty may arise from what may appear to be a contradiction. On
the one side, we have spoken of the experience of thinking as one
the significance of which is universal and equally valid for every
human consciousness. On the other side, we have pointed out that the
ideas which we realise in moral action and which are homogeneous
with those that thinking elaborates, manifest themselves in every
human consciousness in a uniquely individual way. If we cannot get
beyond regarding this antithesis as a "contradiction," and if we
do not recognise that in the living intuition of this actually
existing antithesis a piece of man's essential nature reveals
itself, we shall not be able to apprehend in the true light either
what knowledge is or what freedom is. Those who think of concepts
as nothing more than abstractions from the world of percepts,
and who do not acknowledge the part which intuition plays, cannot
but regard as a "pure contradiction" the thought for which we have
here claimed reality. But if we understand how ideas are experienced
intuitively in their self-sustaining essence, we see clearly that,
in knowledge, man lives and enters into the world of ideas as
into something which is identical for all men. On the other hand,
when man derives from that world the intuitions for his voluntary
actions, he individualises a member of the world of ideas by that
same activity which he practises as a universally human one in the
spiritual and ideal process of cognition. The apparent contradiction
between the universal character of cognitive ideas and the individual
character of moral ideas becomes, when intuited in its reality,
a living concept. It is a criterion of the essential nature of man
that what we intuitively apprehend of his nature oscillates, like a
living pendulum, between knowledge which is universally valid, and
individualised experience of this universal content. Those who fail
to perceive the one oscillation in its real character, will regard
thinking as a merely subjective human activity. For those who are
unable to grasp the other oscillation, man's activity in thinking
will seem to lose all individual life. Knowledge is to the former,
the moral life to the latter, an unintelligible fact. Both will fall
back on all sorts of ideas for the explanation of the one or of the
other, because both either do not understand at all how thinking can
be intuitively experienced, or, else, misunderstand it as an activity
which merely abstracts.