But the spirit has no nature of its own, no destiny to direct its course, no predetermined inevitable lot. It has no fixed qualities, no set mode of being, such as constitute, from the birth to the death of an individual, the species to which it belongs, to whose law it is compelled by nature to submit, whose tyrannical limits and bounds he can never trespass. The spirit, we have seen, cannot but be conceived as free, and its freedom is this privileged attitude to be what it wants to,--angel or beast, as the ancients said; good or evil, true or false, or, generally speaking, to be or not to be. To be or not to be man,--the spirit, that which he is, and which he would not be if he did not _become_. Man is not man by virtue of natural laws. He _becomes_ man. By man I do not mean an animal among animals, held to no accounting of his deeds, who comes into the world, grows, lives, and dies, unaware. Man from the time he considers himself such, and in so far as he considers himself such, _becomes_ through his own efforts. He makes himself what he is the first time he opens his eyes on his inner consciousness and says "_I_,"--the "I" which never would have been uttered, had he not been aroused from the sluggish torpor of natural beings (such as our phantasy represents them) and had not started thinking under his own power and through his own determination. This freedom which is man's prerogative offers merely an external view, has a very hazy consistency, and appears as something illusory, only because we do not define it exclusively as autonomous becoming or self-making. For in fact "becoming" is ordinarily understood in a way which does not admit of being considered as man's prerogative. Does not every living being _become_? The plant vegetates only because it too has an inborn potency by which it is forced from one stage of development to the next, from which in this process it acquires the mode of being which is peculiarly its own, which it did not have before, which no other being could from the outside have conferred upon it. And yet the plant is not a person but a thing: it is not spirit, but a simple object, and as such it is endowed with a definite nature and moved by a definite law, which is the very antithesis of the freedom which is peculiar to the spirit.