Consciousness implies this self-alteration of the subject, which by placing itself as an object in front of itself realises itself, it being real only as self-consciousness. This is the import of the identity of the two terms, subject and object; or of the difference intrinsic to the one, which is but another way of stating it. We may insist as much as we want on the identity of the "I," but it will always be true that this "I" is real only in virtue of its intrinsic difference. And conversely we may insist, as it is more often done, on the difference between the subjective moment of the "I," whereby the "I" is set in opposition to all its objects, and the objective moment in which the ego vanishes. But behind the difference, identity is always to be found. Man, the more he thinks, the more he alters himself, the more objective that reality becomes which he realises by self-consciousness, the more fully he sees the variation, the development, the growth, the enhancement of the object--the world he knows. The spirit's being is its alteration. The more it _is_,--that is, the more it becomes, the more it lives,--the more difficult it is for it to recognise itself in the object. It might therefore be said that he who increases his knowledge also increases his ignorance, if he is unable to trace this knowledge back to its origin, and if the spirit's rally does not induce him to rediscover himself at the bottom of the object, which has been allowed to alter and alienate itself more and more from the secret source of its own becoming. Thus it happens, as was said of old, that "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." All human sorrow proceeds from our incapacity to recognise ourselves in the object, and consequently to feel our own infinite liberty. Subject then and object, and in their synthesis, in their living unity, the spirit, which therefore is neither a subject standing against an object, nor its opposite. The two terms, each one for itself, isolated, are equivalent. But every time human thought has isolated them, whether striving to conceive itself, its own spiritual substance, objectively (God), or as a simple subject (a particular man), it has ever reached most desperate conclusions, now totally blocking its way to the comprehension and justification of its own subjectivity, and now secluding itself in an abstract subjectivity, removed from _all_ which man theoretically and practically needs in order to live. The reality of the spirit is not in the subject as opposed to the object, but in the subject that has in itself the object as its actuality.