This idea evidently must not be confused with the purely subjective ideas which we spoke of above, and which as such are extraneous to reality. This idea is reality itself idealised. It is to this idea, for instance, that we all appeal when we affirm the existence of a justice superior to that of which man is capable, of a justice in behalf of which man is in duty bound to sacrifice his private interests, and even his life. This idea we have in mind when we speak of a sacred and inviolable right, whereas in daily practice there is perhaps no right which is not more or less trampled upon. This idea is before us when we consider truth in general: truth which is indeed real, even though it may not be seen or felt, much more real than physical nature, for nature comes to life and dies and constantly changes, while truth is motionless, impassible, eternal. In its bosom then we must try to find everything that we want to accept as not illusory. But in substituting the conception of an ideal reality for the conception of a material one, reality as a whole continues to be something contradistinguished from us, an object indeed of our thoughts, but one which cannot be conceived as it is in itself except by abstracting it from our own thought. We, then, who open our eager eyes in the endeavour to discover, to know, to orient ourselves, to live in the midst of a known and familiar world; we, thinking beings, and not simply things of nature, beings who as such affirm our personality in the very act of saying _We_, we then are of less account than the earthworms which crawl along until they die unknown to the foot that crushes them. We are nothing because we do not belong to reality; we deceive ourselves into believing that we are doing something on our own account, but in truth we renounce every desire of doing or creating something original, something we might really call ours; and we abandon ourselves, we drift away confused with external reality and submerged under the irresistible current of its laws.