Is the belief accorded to ideas, the 'cre' that is given, a function of the original self? If it were it would belong to a mode of action of that self, an impure act, which must be ruled out. No, the weight of belief falls entirely on the side of the self that is believed in, not the self taken as doing the believing. The apparent self-reference, and all the attendant history of metaphysics belongs to that putative subject, as indeed does the very concept of an original self. This latter is taken to be what merely inhabits, or lights up, a self structure built on self-reference, and on degrees of belief in itself. It may be taken to gather or coagulate at the points where the functioning self is more exactly self-referential due to some sort of elective affinity. However essence is anything but self-referential. The error stems from the fact that the purest nodes of self-reference in the objective or ideal self are the ones that strive the most for ostension, for a showing of their own priority. Acts of self-reference are just those that would seek it, and all the more so because they necessarily fail, since they can only bring forth limited representatives of subject and object. Hence we believe that consciousness has something to do with self-reference, a natural error but an error just the same.