the One, the Other is that “something;” there are two of them. The expression of the consciousness—what is common to the two—is the hardness. There is hardness in my feeling, and the object, too, is hard. This community exists in feeling, the object touches me, and I am filled with its specific quality. When I say “I” and “object,” the two still exist independently; it is only in feeling that the double Being vanishes. The specific character of the object becomes mine, and indeed so much mine that at first reflection in reference to the object, entirely drops away; in so far as the other remains independent, it is not felt, or tasted. I, however, since I get a determinate character in feeling, take up an immediate attitude in it. In feeling I am this single empirical I, and the determinate character of my feeling belongs to this particular empirical self-consciousness.
A distinction is thus implicitly contained in feeling. On the one side am I, the Universal, the Subject; and this transparent, pure fluidity, this immediate reflection into myself, becomes disturbed by an “Other;” but in this “Other” I keep myself entirely with myself, I preserve completely my self-centred existence. The extraneous quality becomes, so to speak, fluid in my universality, and that which is for me an “Other,” I make my own. When another quality has been put into what is lifeless, this particular thing has acquired another quality too. But I, as feeling, maintain myself in that “Other” which penetrates me, and continue to be, in the determinateness, I. The distinction in feeling is, in the first place, an inner one in the Ego itself; it is the distinction between me in my pure fluidity, and me in my definite character. But this inner distinction, owing to the fact that reflection enters into it, is none the less also posited as such. I separate myself from my definite character of determinateness, place it as “Other” over against me, and subjectivity comes to exist on its own account merely in relation to objectivity.
