when the intellectual function predominates we have thought in the strict sense.  A perfect balance of the two would be intuition, which, however, constitutes the goal of knowledge, never fully to be realized.  These two kinds of knowledge, therefore, are not specifically, but only relatively, different:  in all perception reason is also active, and in all thought sensibility, only to a less degree than the opposite function.  Moreover, perception and thought, or sensibility and reason, are by no means to relate to different objects.  They have the same object, only that the organic activity represents it as an indefinite, chaotic manifold, while the activity of reason (whose work consists in discrimination and combination), represents it as a well-ordered multiplicity and unity.  It is the same being which is represented by perception in the form of an “image,” and by thought in the form of a “concept.”  In the former case we have the world as chaos; in the latter, we have it as cosmos.  Inasmuch as the two factors in knowledge represent the same object in relatively different ways, it may be said of them that they are opposed to each other, and yet identical.  The same is true of the two modes of being which Schleiermacher posits as real and ideal over against the two factors in thought.  The real is that which corresponds to the organic function, the ideal that which corresponds to the activity of reason.  These forms of being also are opposed, and yet identical.  Our self-consciousness gives clear proof of the fact that thought and being can be identical; in it, as thinking being, we have the identity of the real and the ideal, of being and thought immediately given.  As the ego, in which the subject of thought and the object of thought are one, is the undivided ground of its several activities, so God is the primal unity, which lies at the basis of the totality of the world.  As in Schelling, the absolute is described as self-identical, absolute unity, exalted above the antithesis of real and ideal, nay, above all antitheses.  God is the negation of opposites, the world the totality of them.  If there were an adequate knowledge of the absolute identity it would be an absolute knowledge.  This is denied, however, to us men, who are never able to rise above the opposition of sensuous and intellectual cognition.  The unity of thought and being is presupposed in all thinking, but can never actually be thought.  As an Idea this identity is indispensable, but to think it definitely, either by conception or judgment, is impossible.  The concepts supreme power (God or creative nature) and supreme cause (fate or providence) do not attain to that which we seek to think in them:  that which has in it no opposition is an idea incapable of realization by man, but, nevertheless, a necessary ideal, the presupposition of all cognition (and volition), and the ground of all certitude.  All knowledge must be related to the absolute unity and be accompanied by it.  Since, then, the absolute identity cannot be presented, but ever sought for only, and absolute knowledge exists only as an ideal, dialectic is not so much a science as a technique of thought and proof, an introduction to philosophic thinking or (since knowledge is thought in common) to discussion in conformity with the rules of the art.  With this the name dialectic returns to its original Platonic meaning.