all my thinking be directed, if I have but formed the purpose to obey the voice of my conscience.  Accordingly, I shall ever consider those beings as beings subsisting for themselves, and forming and accomplishing aims independently of me.  From this viewpoint, I cannot consider them in any other light; and the above-mentioned speculation will vanish like an empty dream before my eyes.  “I think of them as beings of my own species,” said I just now; but strictly, it is not a thought by which they are first represented to me as such.  It is the voice of conscience, the command:  “Here restrain thy liberty, here suppose and respect foreign aims.”  This it is which is first translated into the thought:  “Here is surely and truly, subsisting of itself, a being like me.”  To consider them otherwise, I must first deny the voice of my conscience in life and forget it in speculation.

There hover before me other phenomena which I do not consider as beings like myself, but as irrational objects.  Speculation finds it easy to show how the conception of such objects develops itself purely from my power of conception and its necessary modes of action.  But I comprehend these same things also through need and craving and enjoyment.  It is not the conception—­no, it is hunger and thirst and the satisfaction of these that makes anything food and drink to me.  Of course, I am constrained to believe in the reality of that which threatens my sensuous existence, or which alone can preserve it.  Conscience comes in, at once hallowing and limiting this impulse of Nature.  “Thou shalt preserve, exercise and strengthen thyself, and thy sensuous power; for this sensuous power forms a part of the calculation, in the plan of reason.  But thou canst preserve it only by a suitable use, agreeable to the peculiar interior laws of such matters.  And, besides thyself, there are also others like thee, whose powers are calculated upon like thine own, and who can be preserved only in the same way.  Allow to them the same use of their portion which it is granted thee to make of thine own portion.  Respect what comes to them, as their property.  Use what comes to thee in a suitable manner, as thy property.”  So must I act, and I must think conformably to such action.  Accordingly, I am necessitated to regard these things as standing under their own natural laws, independent of me, but which I am capable of knowing; that is, to ascribe to them an existence independent of myself.  I am constrained to believe in such laws, and it becomes my business to ascertain them; and empty speculation vanishes like mist when the warming sun appears.