The two formal moments in this sceptical culture are firstly the power of consciousness to go back from itself, and to take as its object the whole that is present, itself and its operation included. The second moment is to grasp the form in which a proposition, with whose content our consciousness is in any way occupied, exists. An undeveloped consciousness, on the other hand, usually knows nothing of what is present in addition to the content. For instance, in the judgment “This thing is one,” attention is paid only to the one and the thing, and not to the circumstance that here something, a determinate, is related to the one. But this relation is the essential, and the form of the determinate; it is that whereby this house which is an individual, makes itself one with the universal that is different from it. It is this logical element, _i.e._ the essential element, that Scepticism brings to consciousness, and on this it depends; an example of this is number, the one, as the hypothetical basis of arithmetic. Scepticism does not attempt to give the thing, nor does it dispute as to whether it is thus or thus, but whether the thing itself is something; it grasps the essence of what is expressed, and lays hold of the whole principle of the assertion. As to God, for example, the Sceptics do not inquire whether He has such and such qualities, but turn to what is most inward, to what lies at the ground of this conception, and they ask whether this has reality. “Since we do not know the reality of God,” says Sextus (Pyrrh. Hyp. III. c. I, § 4), “we shall not be able to know and perceive His qualities.” Likewise in the preceding books (II. c. 4, sqq.), inquiry is made as to whether the criterion of truth as fixed by the understanding is anything, whether we know the thing in itself, or whether the ‘I’ is to itself the only absolute certainty. This is the way to penetrate to reality.