Now in this respect, the true opposite of rational knowledge (Wissen) is feeling (Gefühl), which we must therefore discuss at this point. The concept denoted by the word feeling has only a negative content, namely that something present in consciousness is not a concept, not abstract knowledge of reason. However, be it what it may, it comes under the concept of feeling. Thus the immeasurably wide sphere of this concept includes the most heterogeneous things, and we do not see how they come together so long as we have not recognized that they all agree in this negative respect of not being abstract concepts. For the most varied, indeed the most hostile, elements lie quietly side by side in this concept; e.g., religious feeling, feeling of sensual pleasure, moral feeling, bodily feeling such as touch, pain, feeling for colours, for sounds and their harmonies and discords, feeling of hatred, disgust, self-satisfaction, honour, disgrace, right and wrong, feeling of truth, aesthetic feeling, feeling of power, weakness, health, friendship, and so on. Between them there is absolutely nothing in common except the negative quality that they are not abstract knowledge of reason. But this becomes most striking when even a priori knowledge of perception of spatial relations, and moreover knowledge of the pure understanding, are brought under this concept, and generally when it is said of all knowledge, of all truth, of which we are at first conscious only intuitively, but which we have not yet formulated into abstract concepts, that we feel it. To make this clear, I will quote some examples from recent books, because they are striking proofs of my explanation. I remember having read in the introduction to a German translation of Euclid that we ought to make all beginners in geometry draw the figures first before proceeding to demonstrate, since they would then feel geometrical truth, before the demonstration brought them complete knowledge. In the same way F. Schleiermacher speaks in his Kritik der Sittenlehre of logical and mathematical feeling (p. 339), and also of the feeling of the sameness or difference of two formulas (p. 342). Further, in Tennemann’s Geschichte der Philosophie (Vol. I, p. 361), it says: “It was felt that the false conclusions were not right, but yet the mistake could not be discovered.” Now so long as we do not consider this concept of feeling from the right point of view, and do not recognize this one negative characteristic that alone is essential to it, that concept is always bound to give rise to misunderstandings and disputes on account of the excessive width of its sphere, and of its merely negative and very limited content, determined in an entirely one-sided way. As we have in German the almost synonymous word Empfindung (sensation), it would be useful to take over this for bodily feelings as a subspecies. Undoubtedly the origin of this concept of feeling, out of all proportion to the others, is the following. All concepts, and concepts only, are denoted by words; they exist only for the faculty of reason and proceed therefrom; hence with them we are already at a one-sided point of view. But from such a point of view, what is near appears distinct and is set down as positive; what is more distant coalesces, and is soon regarded only as negative. Thus each nation calls all others foreign; the Greeks called all other men barbarians. The Englishman calls everything that is not England or English continent and continental; the believer regards all others as heretics or heathens; the nobleman considers all others as roturiers; to the student all others are Philistines, and so on. Reason itself, strange as it may sound, renders itself guilty of the same one-sidedness, indeed, one may say of the same crude ignorance from pride, since it classifies under the one concept of feeling every modification of consciousness which does not belong directly to its own method of representation, in other words, which is not abstract concept. Hitherto it has had to atone for this by misunderstandings and confusions in its own province, because its own method of procedure had not become clear to it through thorough self-knowledge, for even a special faculty of feeling was put forward, and theories of it were constructed.