The arguments of this essay cover three broadly related topics. The first is concerned with ontological thinking as it has evolved over the last 900 years under the pressure of scientific and technological development.This historical sketch provides the background and context for a re-examination, in the second part, of the nature of conceptual thinking, intuition, the role of heuristic modelling, the function of language, and the fallibility of the human mind, and, in the third, of the interiority of human experience, subjectivity, self-awareness, personal identity, jeopardy, autonomy, and freedom.By re-analyzing these concepts, we can hope to create better maps of the complex inter-dependencies between the structures of conceptual thinking and the experience of an inner life that determine the human condition.