Many disputations about principles in psychology arise from individual characterological differences in the disputants. Thus, in the mode that I have already suggested, characterology might play an important part. When one person thinks to have discovered this, the other that, by introspection, characterology would have to show why the results in the one case should differ from those in the other, or, at least, to point out in what other respects the persons in question were unlike. I see no other possible way of clearing up the disputed points of psychology. Psychology is a science of experiences, and, therefore, it must proceed from the individual to the general, and not, as in the supra-individualistic laws of logic and ethics, proceed from the universal to the individual case. There is no such thing as an empirical general psychology; and it would be a mistake to approach such without having fully reckoned with differential psychology.
It is a great pity that psychology has been placed between philosophy and the analysis of perceptions. From whichever side psychologists approached the subject, they have always been assured of the general validity of their results. Perhaps even so fundamental a question as to whether or no perception itself implies an actual and spontaneous act of consciousness cannot be solved without a consideration of characterological differences.
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.”
The positivist will perhaps only laugh at the self-deceived deceiver, the philosopher who asserts that he has had such experiences. Well, it is not easy to prevent it. It is also unnecessary. But I am by no means of the opinion that this “factor of a higher order” plays the same part in all men of genius of a mystical identity of subject and object as Schelling describes it.
Whether there are undivided experiences in which the dualism of actual life is overcome, as is indicated by Plotin and the Indian Mahatmas, or whether this is only the highest intensification of experience, but in principle similar to all others—does not signify here, the coincidence of subject and object, of time and eternity, the representing of God through living men, will neither be demonstrated as possible nor denied as impossible. The experiencing of one’s own “I” is not to be begun by theoretical knowledge, and no one has ever, so far, tried to put it in the position of a systematic philosophy. I shall, therefore, not call this factor of a higher order, which manifests itself in some men in one way and in other men in another way, an essential manifestation of the true ego, but only a phase of it.
Every great man knows this phase of the ego. He may become conscious of it first through the love of a woman, for the great man loves more intensely than the ordinary man; or it may be from the contrast given by a sense of guilt or the knowledge of having failed; these, too, the great man feels more intensely than smaller-minded people. It may lead him to a sense of unity with the all, to the seeing of all things in God, or, and this is more likely, it may reveal to him the frightful dualism of nature and spirit in the universe, and produce in him the need, the craving, for a solution of it, for the secret inner wonder. But always it leads the great man to the beginning of a presentation of the world for himself and by himself, without the help of the thought of others.
This intuitive vision of the world is not a great synthesis elaborated at his writing-table in his library from all the books that have been written; it is something that has been experienced, and as a whole it is clear and intelligible, although details may still be obscure and contradictory. The excitation of the ego is the only source of this intuitive vision of the world as a whole in the case of the artist as in that of the philosopher. And, however different they may be, if they are really intuitive visions of the cosmos, they have this in common, something that comes only from the excitation of the ego, the faith that every great man possesses, the conviction of his possession of an “I” or soul, which is solitary in the universe, which faces the universe and comprehends it.
From the time of this first excitation of his ego, the great man, in spite of lapses due to the most terrible feeling, the feeling of mortality, will live in and by his soul.
And it is for this reason, as well as from the sense of his creative powers, that the great man has so intense a self-consciousness. Nothing can be more unintelligent than to talk of the modesty of great men, of their inability to recognise what is within them. There is no great man who does not well know how far he differs from others (except during these periodical fits of depression to which I have already alluded). Every great man feels himself to be great as soon as he has created something; his vanity and ambition are, in fact, always so great that he over-estimates himself. Schopenhauer believed himself to be greater than Kant. Nietzsche declared that “Thus spake Zarathustra” was the greatest book in the world.
There is, however, a
