Character too is an empirical concept, and like all such concepts, it has a truthfulness which is not clearly discernible, but dimly visible. Character signifies rational personality, using the term rationality to mean, not the movement or the becoming which belongs peculiarly to reason as the form of spiritual activity, but the coherence of the object on which this activity is fixed, which coherence in turn consists in the harmony whereby it is possible to think all the parts of objective thought as forming a single whole, in that there is no conflict or contradiction among them, and in as much as the object remains always the same throughout all these particulars. If in the course of reasoning we introduce conflicting statements which cannot possibly be referred to the same thing, we cannot be said to reason. Rationality is the permanence of the being of which we think: it is firmness of conception, stability of a law which we apply to all particulars that come under its sway. For the object of consciousness is characterised, in respect to the act which constitutes it, by this stability and immutability. What we think is _that_ and no other, whereas thought, by which we think it, is a becoming and a continuous change. But the character of man is in the object, in the contents of his thought, in what he gradually builds himself up to, in the determined personality which he constitutes by thinking, or, in other words, _in his body_. But body, be it remembered, in an idealistic sense, body as a system, forming, with its law and its configuration, the solid basis of every ulterior development. This truth, vaguely accepted by common sense, which looks upon a strong constitution as a preliminary to a sound character, will appear in its full light only after it has been stripped of the fantastic and material attributes which it receives from a realistically vulgar way of conceiving the body materially. For it is evident that a feeble and sickly man may yet have a steel-like character. Farinata, who stands "erect with breast and brow," as though he held Hell in contempt: Giordano Bruno, who amidst the flames that already consume his flesh disdainfully turns his eyes from the symbol of the religion which had thrust him on the stake, are evident examples of a strength of mind with no relation to their physical powers, which were already destroyed or about to be scattered by an irresistible might. Leopardi is right when he scornfully protests that his ill health is not the cause of that sad pessimism which in his mind solemnly challenges "the unseemly hidden Power."