The impulse to happiness which arises with consciousness as thought and will, calls itself "I." It is the individual who, with every nerve-cell and every drop of blood, attempts his own realization. But all individuals are alike in this, that they reach, at last, a point where they recognize the fact that their ego is but a miserable half which needs a Thou to its completion. In the union of the Thou and the I, the first I becomes a complete and perfect I. Man and woman both realize that only together do they represent the whole human being. I and Thou together constitute a We. The ego remains after, as before the union, the axis upon which the whole world turns. But the egoism of mere understanding is, by a broader thought, elevated to the altruism of reason. As the highest union of thought and will, the reason becomes Idea in and for itself, actual, absolute Idea. With the We was born the Saviour who should reconcile the sharply opposed factors of awaking consciousness. The light of his gospel spread in wider and wider circles; man and woman no longer beheld, each, merely his own happiness in the other; they saw their mutual happiness in their children, and their own and their children's happiness in friends, and their own and their children's and their friends' happiness in their fellow-men. The I of the reason is the self-conscious We. The struggle for happiness has brought forth, out of the privileges and endeavors of individuals, civilization in its present form. Want and the necessity for labor have been the spur to endeavor and advance. Through the concepts of ends and of intention, the self-conscious will further evolved ideas, which themselves undergo a struggle in the activities to which they give rise; and this is no longer the struggle for existence, but the struggle for civilization. There are three Ideas which, arising out of the extension of the I to Thou and We, are the spring of all ethical conceptions; these are Love, Humanity, and Public Spirit.[75] Love is the passion of passions and is the spring of all capacity to altruistic emotion. Love is life in its highest degree;[76] and by the manner in which a human being loves one may know what manner of man he is, and what will be the nature of his feelings towards his fellow-men in other relations of life. A man's conduct towards women is the surest test of his character. That which Spencer calls Integration, that which has created all nature, from the first germ to the perfect human being, and, as preservative cell-labor, still continues to create,--this infinite Something comes to consciousness in the human being, as Love. On the lowest plane it can appear only as simple impulse; but what, developing from stage to stage, it can accomplish, the history of Love shows us.