"Considering the common experience of the world, its elementary condition can be considered to be knowing, in its most generic sense of awareness of a certain static or dynamic determination. Moreover, it is usual to distinguish object from subject, a distinction which is legitimate, provided that the terms areproperly understood.

1. The "objective," positively, can only be the consciousness of its aspect of determinateness, of qualification; the subjective, this same consciousness taken instead according to its aspect of awareness or certainty in general. Considering things in this way means formulating the idealistic thesis in its most elementary form, which results in an almost trivial evidence as soon as we pay attention to it. It is evident, in fact, that it is inconceivable that an object could be defined by an absolute otherness with respect to the subject of experience; that all the determinations for which and with which the object is known - to whatever order they refer, including its own possible relative "aseity", its dependence or independence from the Ego - are and are certain insofar as they are particular determinations of consciousness, in the knot of which what is called reality is borrowed without residue. This can also be expressed by saying that identity is the elementary datum, the original substance of knowing. Determinateness - the objective - instead of being linked to a direct perception or sensation can proceed from judgment, inference, position; but, in any case, that it remains simply the "known," therefore precisely simple phenomenon of consciousness - this is a proposition in itself self-evident, to which one cannot but adhere without falling into contradiction. Thus the criticism of realism is very simple and well-known: it refutes itself precisely at the point of claiming to be true. In fact, if it is true, as it claims, that the idea or thought is something different from the real, that the object exists in itself, then realism itself, which in any case is something other than the realm of reality, is not true. realism itself, which in any case cannot be anything other than an idea or a system of ideas, can in no way demonstrate the congruence of its conception with the system of reality (1). Therefore, if it is true, it refutes itself: the real of which, according to sensible discourse, it speaks, falls in one way or another in the experience of the subject.
Thus the subject as consciousness presents itself as the ether that underlies all that world, which is its world. It is not included in the world, but the latter within it, and within it it unfolds. The well-known formula of transcendental idealism corresponding to this is: the world is my representation, understood as including not only imagining and perceiving, but also every datum elaborated by the faculties of reflection, since this datum will always be, in primis et ante omnia, a simple determinateness of consciousness. In this first degree, however, idealism is at one with experimental positivism and with a rigorous phenomenalism."