It should not now be necessary to criticise this concept of a reality assumed to exist, in antecedence to the activity of the spirit, and which is the sole support of this distinction between will and intellect. We might say perhaps that though everything does indeed depend from the spirit, and though all is spirit, yet this completely spiritual reality is on one hand what is produced, the realisation of new realities (will), but on the other hand it is but the knowledge of its own reality, and by this knowledge gives no increment to its being. However, if we adopted this view, we would slip back to the position we abandoned as untenable, since a thought which propounds the problem of its essence and of the essence of the reality which it cognises can be but mere knowing. For it is again faced by a reality--even though it has in this case been arbitrarily presumed identical with it--a reality which is as an antecedent to it, and leaves to it only the task of looking on. So we must conclude that the life of the spirit is never mere contemplation. What seems to be contemplation--that consciousness which the spirit acquires of itself, and, acquiring which, realises itself--is a creation: a creation not of things but of its own self. For what are things but the spirit as it is looked at abstractly in the multiplicity of its manifestations? We shall more easily understand that our knowing and our doing are indiscernible, if we recall that our doing is not what is also perceived externally, a motion in space caused by us. This external manifestation is quite subordinate and adventitious. The essential character of our doing is the internal will, which does not, properly speaking, modify things, but does modify us, by bringing out in us a personality which otherwise would not have been. This is the substance of the will, which we cannot deny to thought, if thought is, as I have shown, development, and therefore continuous self-creation of the personality.