You do not therefore begin by getting a fact put before you. Your _fact,_ in philosophy, must be your own _act_: not something done and dead, passive, a thing, but something doing, alive, active: your introspection must be, let us say, an experiment in the growing, responsive, quick life, not anatomy of the mere _cadaver._ Think, therefore, and catch yourself in the act of thinking. Get something before your mind's eye, and see what it involves. It matters not what you perceive or feel: only realise it fully and penetrate its meaning and implications. It is of course the perception of something here and now. And you would be, in ordinary life, eager to get on to something else--to associate the present fact to something perceived elsewhere, to draw conclusions about things yet to come. But if you philosophise, you must check this practical-minded impatience and concede yourself leisure to ponder deeply all that the single perception involves. Be content to sit awhile with Mary, by the side of Rachel of old. Let Martha bustle about. Fichte tells you that your perception rests,--and you, you _see_ that it rests, on the 'I am that I am,'--on the I = I, i. e. on the continuity, identity, and unity of the percipient self. Make the statement of what you perceive, believe it, that is, assert it: and you have--done what? You have pledged your whole self_--falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus_--to its truth: its background is your whole and one mental life. And is that all? You have also called the world to witness: your statement--if, as it professes, it form an item however slight in the realm of knowledge--requests and expects every other 'I' to acknowledge your perception. Your certainty of the fact rests on the certainty of your self: and your self is a self certified by its ever-postulated identity with other selves, so on _ad infinitum_. In affirming this (whatever be your statement) you affirm the Absolute Infinite Ego. Heaven and earth are at stake in every jot and tittle[2].