ience, and the result of all other experience. In other words,
conscience, in this its simplest form, must be supposed in order to
consciousness, that is, to human consciousness. Brutes may be, and are
scions, but those beings only, who have an I, 'scire possunt hoc vel
illud una cum seipsis'; that is, 'conscire vel scire aliquid mecum', or
to know a thing in relation to myself, and in the act of knowing myself
as acted upon by that something.

Now the third person could never have been distinguished from the first
but by means of the second. There can be no He without a previous Thou.
Much less could an I exist for us, except as it exists during the
suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of brutes may be
best understood, by conceiving them as somnambulists. This is a deep
meditation, though the position is capable of the strictest
proof,--namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou
is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou,
and yet not the same. And this again is only possible by putting them in
opposition as correspondent opposites, or correlatives. In order to
this, a something must be affirmed in the one, which is rejected in the
other, and this something is the will. I do not will to consider myself
as equal to myself, for in the very act of constituting myself 'I', I
take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of comparison, that is,
of any application of the will. If then, I 'minus' the will be the
'thesis'; [2] Thou 'plus' will must be the 'antithesis', but the
equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness
in order to establish the equality, is the true definition of
conscience. But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You
no They, These or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials
and subjects of consciousness, and the conditions of experience, it is
evident that the con-science is the root of all consciousness,--'a
fortiori', the precondition of all experience,--and that the conscience
cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience. Soon,
however, experience comes into play. We learn that there are other
impulses beside the dictates of conscience; that there are powers within
us and without us ready to usurp the throne of conscience, and busy in
tempting us to transfer our allegiance. We learn that there are many
things contrary to conscience, and therefore to be rejected, and