him to be part of his greater self. The speculative ground of such a conception of life must be briefly stated before coming to the idea of Liberty and Law, and to that of citizen and state. Spiritual reality is not Mind plus some spiritual fact; it is purely and simply Mind as subject, since any spiritual fact must be resolved in the real activity of the subject, who knows it. Common language expresses this by saying that to know something thoroughly we must make it our own. Strictly speaking we know no others. If we know them and speak of them they must be within us. To know is to identify, to overcome otherness as such. As long as we feel ourselves confronted by the spiritual existence of others as different from ourselves, something from which we must distinguish ourselves, something which we presuppose as having been in existence before our birth, it is merely a sign that we are not yet realising the spirituality of their existence. To us they are still nature. This doctrine would be absurd if it were not considered in the light of Gentile’s notion of the transcendental and empirical selves, both meeting in man, as a concrete person in whom the infinity of the transcendental individualises itself through the finiteness of the empirical. The transcendental ego being one and the empirical egos being multiplicity itself, it is obvious that the _differences_ are as necessary to the identity as the fuel to the fire. It is, indeed, through the process of transcending empirical differences that man asserts the transcendental character of mind.