a contemplation of a pure activity, which is not permanent but progressive, not a being but a life. The philosopher, therefore, discovers this intellectual contemplation as fact of consciousness, (for him it is a fact; for the original Ego a fact and act both together—a deed-act,) and he thus discovers it not immediately, as an isolated part of his consciousness, but by distinguishing and separating what in common consciousness occurs in unseparated union. Quite a different problem it is to explain this intellectual contemplation, which is here presupposed as fact, in its _possibility_, and by means of this explanation to defend it against the charge of deception and deceptiveness, which is raised by dogmatism; or, in other words, to prove the _faith_ in the reality of this intellectual contemplation, from which faith transcendental idealism confessedly starts—by a something still higher; and to show up the interest which leads us to place faith in its reality, or in the system of Reason. This is accomplished by showing up the _Moral Law_ in us, in which the Ego is characterized as elevated through it above all the original modifications, as impelled by an absolute, or in itself, (in the Ego,) grounded activity; and by which the Ego is thus discovered to be an absolute Active. In the consciousness of this law, which doubtless is an immediate consciousness, and not derived from something else, the contemplation of self-activity and freedom is grounded. _I am given to myself through myself as something, which is to be active in a certain manner; hence, I am given to myself through myself as something active generally; I have the life in myself, and take it from out of myself. Only through this medium of the Moral Law do I see_ MYSELF; _and if I see myself through that law, I necessarily see myself as self-active_; and it is thus that there arises in a consciousness—which otherwise would only be the consciousness of a sequence of my representations—the utterly foreign ingredient of an _activity of myself_.