229. Most men have little reflex consciousness, and the greatest intellectual force operates directly. This ideological fact is connected with moral truths of the utmost importance. The human mind was not born to contemplate itself, to think that it thinks: its affections were not given as an object of reflection, but as impulses which elevate it to what it is called to: the principal object of its intelligence and love is, in this life as in the other, the infinite being. The worship of itself is an aberration of pride; its punishment is darkness. 230. All great scientific discoveries lie in the objective, not in the subjective order. The exact sciences, natural as well as moral, have emanated not from reflexion of the subject upon itself, but from knowledge of objects and their relations. Even the metaphysical sciences, in all that is most solid in them, ontology, cosmology, and theology, are purely objective: ideology and psychology which consider the subject, are full of the obscurity inherent in all that is subjective; ideology scarcely does more than merely observe internal phenomena,--an observation, we may remark, generally very defective, poorly made, and bewildered with vain cavils; and what has psychology itself, truly demonstrated, except the simplicity of the soul, the necessary consequence of the unity of consciousness? In all else it resembles ideology, and to a certain point, is confounded with it; it observes phenomena, and afterwards defines and classifies them better or worse, but fails to explain their mysterious nature. 231. Consciousness is the foundation of the other criteria, not as a proposition which serves as their basis, but as a fact which is a necessary condition of them all. 232. Consciousness tells us that we see the idea of one thing contained in the idea of another: thus far there is nothing but appearance; the formula, to express its testimony would be: _it appears to me_; which denotes a purely subjective phenomenon. But this phenomenon is accompanied by an intellectual instinct, an irresistible impulse of nature, which makes us assent to the truth of the relation, not only so far as it is in us, but as it is formed without us, in the purely objective order, whether in the sphere of reality or possibility. Thus it is explained how evidence is founded on consciousness, not as identified with it, but as resting upon it as a fact from which it cannot be abstracted, and as also containing the intellectual instinct which makes us believe whatever is evident to be true.