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].
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.