I answer: this act is in its nature objective. I am for myself; this is a fact. Now I could have thus come to be for myself only through an act, for I am free; and only through this thus determined act, for only through it do I become for myself every moment, and through every other act something quite different is produced. That acting, indeed, is the very conception of the Ego; and the conception of the Ego is the conception of that acting; both conceptions are quite the same; and that conception of the Ego can mean and can not be made to mean anything, but what has been stated. _It is so_, because _I make it so_. The philosopher only makes clear to himself what he really thinks and has ever thought, when he thinks or thought _himself_; but that he does think himself is to him immediate fact of consciousness. That question, concerning the objectivity is grounded on the very curious presupposition that the Ego is something else than its own thought of itself, and that something else than this thought and outside of it—God may know what they do mean!—is again the ground of it, concerning the actual nature of which outside something they are very much troubled. Hence if they ask for such an objective validity of the thought, or for a connection between this object and the subject, I cheerfully confess that the Science of Knowledge can give them no instruction concerning it. If they choose to, they may themselves enter, in this or any other case, upon the discovery of such a connection, until they, perhaps, will recollect that this Unknown which they are hunting, is, after all, again their thought, and that whatsoever they may invent as its ground, will also be their thought, and thus _ad infinitum_; and that, indeed, they cannot speak of or question about anything without at the same time thinking it. Now, in this act, which is arbitrary and in time, for the philosopher as such, but which is for the Ego—which he constructs, by virtue of his just deduced right, for the sake of subsequent observations and conclusions—necessarily and originally; in this act, I say, the philosopher looks at himself, and immediately contemplates his own acting; he knows what he does, because _he does it_. Does a consciousness thereof arise in him? Without doubt; for he not only contemplates, but _comprehends_ also. He comprehends his act, as an _acting generally_, of which he has already a conception by virtue of his previous experience; and as this _determined_, into itself _returning_ acting, as which he contemplates it in himself. By this characteristic determination he elevates it above the sphere of _general acting_.