Observe the contrast to the ordinary methods of expression. Popular language--if the popular philosophers are to be trusted as its exponents--says 'an impression is produced by an external object on the senses, and causes an idea in the mind.' The 'object' works a series of marvellous effects on a mind, which--to begin with--is hardly describable as anything more than an imagined point of resistance, getting reality by being repeatedly impinged upon.[8] Fichte's statements are rather interpreters of the vulgar phrases, which say 'I hear, I see';--as if, forsooth, the 'I' did it all. According to Fichte, the 'I,'--the absolute 'I,' is the real (but secret) source of the position in which consciousness finds itself limited by a non-ego. But within the finite ego and its consciousness there is no reminiscence or awareness of this its great co-partner's--the absolute ego's--act. For the finite consciousness, the beginning of its activity--i. e. of all empirical consciousness, lies in an impulse or stimulus from without--a mere somewhat of which we can predicate the very minimum of attributes. It is only _felt_ as opposing: and this is the first stage or grade of theoretical consciousness: Sensation. But in the perpetual antithesis--in the self-opposition which is the radical act of consciousness--the mere limitation of Ego by non-Ego is confronted by the underlying activity of the Ego which re-asserts the limitation as its own act. Thus while we are, as it were, impressed, we re-act against that impression--we set it forth before us, as ours, and free ourselves from its immediate incumbency and oppression. Instead of mere sentiency or feeling, we have a perception (or intuition) of it.