It seemed to him that consciousness butting up against what was most unlike itself, which it conceived as the complacent brutality of facts, had more of the essential nature of the existent, while what he was forever being tempted to think of as himself, was an idea of artificiality and specialness boxed up within, and deflecting, another idea of necessity, namely that of consciousness coinciding with an individual life. It was part of the notion of a fall into division in which nothing can stop the process until the smallest part is reached; the arrest being caused by the precursor of identification. The idea of division is merely a possibility comprehended in consciousness resting in its undivided and unchanging nature; but as such the idea must develop the cascade of its consequences to the uttermost degree. The quality that is most reflective of the original nature of the origin in this is the necessity, or the incorrigible facticity of the experienced oppositions. It could be thought of as consciousness, whose essence is pure freedom, attempting to understand itself and thus conceiving the idea of perfect necessity, its negative image. But thought itself, being precisely such a inter-relation of freedom and necessity could only partially embrace such an understanding.