The picture of another man that a man gains through personal contact with him is based on certain distortions. These are not simple mistakes resulting from incomplete experience, defective vision, or sympathetic or antipathetic prejudices. They are fundamental changes in the quality of the actual object perceived, and they are of two types. We see the other person generalized, in some measure. This is so, perhaps, because we cannot fully represent to ourselves an individuality which deviates from our own. Any recreation of a person is determined by one’s similarity to him. To be sure, similarity is by no means the only condition of psychological insight, for dissimilarity, too, seems required in order to gain distance and objectivity…It seems, however, that every individual has in himself a core of individuality which cannot be recreated by anybody else whose core differs qualitatively from his own. And the challenge to recreate is logically incompatible with psychological distance and objective judgment which are also bases for representing another. We cannot completely know the individuality of another.

The break with the past, which, for more than a century, civilized mankind has been laboring unceasingly to bring about, makes the consciousness turn more and more to the present. This accentuation of the present evidently at the same time emphasizes the element of change, and a class will turn to fashion in all fields…in proportion to the degree in which it supports the given civilizing tendency. It may almost be considered a sign of the increased power of fashion, that is has overstepped the bounds of its original domain, which comprised only personal externals, and has acquired an increasing influence over taste, over theoretical observations, and even over the moral foundations of life.