the nature of an act. It is an act in and by which we take upon
ourselves an allegiance, and consequently the obligation of fealty;
and this fealty or fidelity implying the power of being unfaithful,
it is the first and fundamental sense of faith. It is likewise the
commencement of experience, and the result of all other experience.
In other words, conscience in this its simplest form, must be
supposed in order to consciousness, that is, to human consciousness.
Brutes may be and are scions, but those beings only who have an I,
scire possunt hoc vel illud una cum seipsis; that is, conscire vel
scire aliquid mecum, or to know a thing in relation to myself, and in
the act of knowing myself as acted upon by that something.

Now the third person could never have been distinguished from the
first but by means of the second. There can be no He without a
previous Thou. Much less could an I exist for us except as it exists
during the suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of
brutes may be best understood by considering them as somnambulists.
This is a deep meditation, though the position is capable of the
strictest proof, namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and
that a Thou is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as
equal to Thou, and yet not the same. And this, again, is only
possible by putting them in opposition as correspondent opposites, or
correlatives. In order to this, a something must be affirmed in the
one which is rejected in the other, and this something is the will.
I do not will to consider myself as equal to myself, for in the very
act of constructing myself _I_, I take it as the same, and therefore
as incapable of comparison, that is, of any application of the will.
If, then, I MINUS the will be the THESIS, Thou, PLUS will, must be
the ANTITHESIS, but the equation of Thou with I, by means of a free
act, negativing the sameness in order to establish the equality, is