Great Throughts Treasury

"Man is the questioning being."

"The consciousness of the individual person unfolds as the experience of his own inner history. Every single moment is a phase in his historical becoming. Everything coming into consciousness in a specific moment is determined by how it fits into the course of this becoming or how it arrests or runs counter to it. Everything attention lays hold of, is present and is now. But this Now is the Now of the inner life-history, whose progress in becoming is not measurable by the standard of objective time"

"Self-awareness does not precede apprehension of the world: one is not before the other; one is not without the other."

"In sensory seeing the thing is for me, for me here and now in a passing moment. But after the world of perception, this being-there-form is apprehended as a moment in a universal, general chain of events. "

"In sensory experience I always experience myself and the world at the same time, not myself directly and the Other by inference, not myself before the Other, nor without the Other, nor the Other without myself."