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 the true definition of conscience. But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You no They, These, or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness and the conditions of experience, it is evident that conscience is the root of all consciousness—_à fortiori_, the precondition of all experience—and that the conscience cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience.