The purpose of this work is to apply characterology to the solution of a few of these doubtful matters, with special reference to the distinctions between the sexes. The different conceptions of the I-problem, however, depend not so much on differences of sex as on differences in giftedness. The dispute between Hume and Kant receives its characterological explanation much in the same way as if I were to distinguish two men in so far as the one held in the highest esteem the works of Makart and Gounod, the other those of Rembrandt and Beethoven. I would simply distinguish the two by their giftedness. So also the judgments about the “I” must be very different in the cases of differently gifted men. There have been no truly great men who were not persuaded of the existence of the “I”; a man who denies it cannot be a great man.
In the course of the following pages this proposition will be taken as absolutely binding, and will be used really as a means of valuing genius.
There has been no famous man who, at least some time in the course of his life, and generally earlier in proportion to his greatness, has not had a moment in which he was absolutely convinced of the possession of an ego in the highest sense.
Let us compare the following utterances of three very great geniuses.
Jean Paul relates in his autobiographical sketch, “Truths from my own Life”:
“I can never forget a circumstance which, so far, has been related by no one—the birth of my own self-consciousness, the time and place of which I can tell. One morning I was standing, as a very young child, at the front door, and looking towards the wood-shed I suddenly saw, all at once my inner likeness. ‘I’ am ‘I’ flashed like lightning from the skies across me, and since then has remained. I saw myself then for the first time and for ever. This cannot be explained as a confusion of memory, for no alien narrative could have blended itself with this sacred event, preserved permanently in my memory by its vividness and novelty.”
Novalis, in his “Miscellaneous Fragments,” refers to an identical experience:
“This factor every one must experience for himself. It is a factor of the higher order, and reveals itself only to higher men; but men should strive to induce it in themselves. Philosophy is the exercise of this factor, it is a true self-revelation, the stimulation of the real ego by the ideal ego. It is the foundation of all other revelations; the resolution to philosophise is a challenge to the actual ego, to become conscious of itself, to grow and to become a soul.”
Schelling discusses the same phenomenon in his “Philosophical Letters upon Dogmatism and Criticism,” a little known early work, in which occur the following beautiful words:
“In all of us there dwells a secret marvellous power of freeing ourselves from the changes of time, of withdrawing to our secret selves away from external things, and of so discovering to ourselves the eternal in us in the form of unchangeability. This presentation of ourselves to ourselves is the most truly personal experience upon which depends everything that we know of the supra-sensual world. This presentation shows us for the first time what real existence is, whilst all else only appears to be. It differs from every presentation of the sense in its perfect freedom, whilst all other presentations are bound, being overweighted by the burden of the object. Still there exists for those who have not this perfect freedom of the inner sense some approach to it, experiences approaching it from which they may gain some faint idea of it.... This intellectual presentation occurs when we cease to be our own object, when, withdrawing into ourselves, the perceiving self merges in the self-perceived. At that moment we annihilate time and duration of time; we are no longer in time, but time, or rather eternity itself, is in us. The external world is no longer an object for us, but is lost in us.”