But in stating that man's becoming is autonomous (or true) we have simply formulated a problem without giving it a solution. What does this autonomous becoming consist in? Simply to notice its existence would never help us to understand it. Every fact is intelligible only as an effect of a cause. And a cause is a cause on condition that it be a thing other than the effect. In order to understand the autonomous becoming or freedom of the spirit, we must not consider it as a fact, that is, as something done. A thing made presupposes the making; and from the deed we must rise to the doing, but to a doing which shall not itself be a thing done, a fact, and similar therefore to the doings which we witness as mere spectators. The doing in which our autonomous becoming is detected is that one of which _We_ are not spectators but actors, we the spectators of every other doing, we as the thinking Activity. This then is the becoming which rigorously may be called autonomous: the one which we know not as spectators but as actors, which comes forth as that reality which is produced by the act of knowing, and therefore is not known because it exists, but exists because it is known,--our existence. It is the existence of us who know, for example, that a==b, and who are such only in so far as we know and are conscious of knowing that a==b,--of us who suffer or rejoice, and who cannot be in this or that state except by knowing it, so that no cause could reduce us to such a state, unless we were conscious of such a cause and felt its valid application to us,--of us, above all, who are not ourselves unless we apperceive ourselves, by reflecting upon ourselves, and thus acquiring existence as a personality, as human self-consciousness, as thought. Thought in opposition to nature, with which it is constantly contrasted, is nothing but this self-reflection which establishes the personality, and that reality which, absolutely, is not, but becomes. Every reality other than thought _becomes_ relatively; and its becoming is intelligible simply as the effect of another becoming. Only thought, only the Spirit, is absolute becoming, and its becoming is its liberty.