"Immediate feeling is certainly the first, is the vital force; in it is life, just as it is indeed said that from the heart flows life. But then this feeling must “be kept,” understood in the same way as when it said, “Keep your heart, for from it flows life.” It must be cleansed of selfishness, kept from selfishness; it must not be left to its own devices, but, on the contrary, that which is to kept must be entrusted to the power of something higher that keeps it – just as the loving mother prays to God to keep her child. In immediate feeling, one human being never understands the other. As soon as something happens to him personally, he understands everything differently. When he himself is suffering, he does not understand another’s suffering, and when he himself is happy he still does not understand it. Immediate feeling selfishly understands everything in relation to itself and therefore is in the disunion of double-mindedness with all others, because there can be unity only in the soundly understood equality of sincerity, and in selfish shortsightedness his conviction is continually being changed, or it is chance that it is not changed, since the reason for this is that by chance his life is not touched by any change. But such firmness of conviction is a delusion on the part of the pampered, because a conviction is not firm when everything forces it upon one, as it were, and makes it firm, but its firmness manifests itself in the ups and downs of everything. Rarely, indeed, does a person’s life avoid all changes, and in the changes the conviction of immediate feeling is a delusion, the momentary impression blown up into a view of life as a whole."