The popular distinction—current also in philosophy—between “being” and “becoming” seems to miss the essential point in the contrast it is meant to express. An endless becoming—“action,” “actuality”—will always be thought of also as a condition (as it is, for example, in physical notions such as uniform velocity and the condition of motion, and in the basic hypothesis of the kinetic theory of gases) and therefore ranked in the category of “being.” On the other hand, out of the results that we do in fact obtain by and in consciousness, we may, with Goethe, distinguish as final elements “becoming” and “the become” (_Das Werden_, _das Gewordne_). In all cases, though the atom of human-ness may lie beyond the grasp of our powers of abstract conception, the very clear and definite _feeling_ of this contrast—fundamental and diffused throughout consciousness—is the most elemental something that we reach. It necessarily follows therefore that “the become” is always founded on a “becoming” and not the other way round. I distinguish further, by the words “proper” and “alien” (_das Eigne_, _das Fremde_), those two basic facts of consciousness which for all men in the waking (not in the dreaming) state are established with an immediate inward certainty, without the necessity or possibility of more precise definition. The element called “alien” is always related in some way to the basic fact expressed by the word “perception,” i.e., the outer world, the life of sensation. Great thinkers have bent all their powers of image-forming to the task of expressing this relation, more and more rigorously, by the aid of half-intuitive dichotomies such as “phenomena and things-in-themselves,” “world-as-will and world-as-idea,” “ego and non-ego,” although human powers of exact knowing are surely inadequate for the task. Similarly, the element “proper” is involved with the basic fact known as feeling, i.e., the inner life, in some intimate and invariable way that equally defies analysis by the methods of abstract thought.