The person has the right to place its will into any thing, which thereby becomes mine; the thing, since it has no such purpose in itself, receives its determination and soul from my will – the absolute right of appropriation which human beings have over all things.

That so-called philosophy which ascribes to immediate individual things, to the impersonal, reality in the sense of independence and true being-for-itself and being-in-itself, and likewise that philosophy which asserts that spirit cannot know the truth and cannot know what the thing in itself is, is directly refuted by the way the free will behaves toward these things. If, for consciousness, for intuition and representation, the so-called external things have the semblance of independence, then, by contrast, the free will is the idealism, the truth of such actuality.