At which plain frankness there was much cachinnation and even muttering among the baser sort. Even wiser heads forgot--if they ever knew--that Leibniz a century before had startled the world of his day by a view that 'the Ego or something like it[3] was, under the name of _monad_, the presupposition of each and every detail of existence in any organic total. It was useless for Fichte to repeat[4] that his philosophical Ego was not the empirical or individual ego which he in this every-day world had to provide clothes and company for. It is hard to persuade the world that it does not know that 'I am I,' and what that means. Later, therefore, Fichte, going along with the movement of contemporary speculation, and willing to avoid one source of confusion, tended to keep off the name of Ego from the absolute basis of all knowledge and experienced reality. But unquestionably the absolutising of the Ego is the characteristic note of his first period in philosophy: and it rings with the spirit of the heaven-storming Titan. It means that the cardinal principle and foundation of man's conscious moral and intellectual life is identical with the principle of the Universe, even if the Universe seem not to know it. It means that self-consciousness--the certainty that I am I and one in all my manifestations--is the highest word yet uttered. In, or under, the surface of human knowledge and belief in reality, there is a transcendental Ego--a self identical with all other selves,-- infinite, unlimited, unconditional, absolute. The certainty of human knowledge--and therefore of all reality in consciousness--is the Absolute,--an absolute certainty and knowledge--but an absolute with which I identify myself,--which I am, and which is me. This is the absolute _thesis_--the nerve and utter basis-laying--at the ground, or rather under the ground, of all I know, feel, and will.