The outcome of these investigations is that truth is not, as the current view has it, an ideal reproduction of a some real object, but a free product of the human spirit, which would not exist anywhere at all unless we ourselves produced it. It is not the task of knowledge to reproduce in conceptual form something already existing independently. Its task is to create a wholly new realm which, united with the world of sense-data, ends by yielding us reality in the full sense. In this way, man's supreme activity, the creative productivity of his spirit, finds its organic place in the universal world-process. Without this activity it would be impossible to conceive the world-process as a totality complete in itself. Man does not confront the world-process as a passive spectator who merely copies in his mind the events which occur, without his participation, in the cosmos without. He is an active co-creator in the world-process, and his knowledge is the most perfect member of the organism of the universe. This view carries with it an important consequence for our conduct, for our moral ideals. These, too, must be regarded, not as copies of an external standard, but as rooted within us. Similarly, we refuse to look upon our moral laws as the behests of any power outside us. We know no "categorical imperative" which, like a voice from the Beyond, prescribes to us what to do or to leave undone. Our moral ideals are our own free creations. All we have to do is to carry out what we prescribe to ourselves as the norm of our conduct. Thus, the concept of truth as a free act leads to a theory of morals based on the concept of a perfectly free personality. These theses, of course, are valid only for that part of our conduct the laws of which our thinking penetrates with complete comprehension. So long as the laws of our conduct are merely natural motives or remain obscure to our conceptual thinking, it may be possible from a higher spiritual level to perceive how far they are founded in our individuality, but we ourselves experience them as influencing us from without, as compelling us to action. Every time that we succeed in penetrating such a motive with clear understanding, we make a fresh conquest in the realm of freedom. The relation of these views to the theory of Eduard von Hartmann, who is the most significant figure in contemporary philosophy, will be made clear to the reader in detail in the course of this essay, especially as regards the problem of knowledge. A prelude to a Philosophy of Spiritual Activity--this is what the present essay offers. That philosophy itself, completely worked out, will shortly follow.