Such desire, then, implies on the part of the desiring subject (a) a distinction of itself at once from its desire and from the real world; (b) a consciousness that the conditions of the real world are at present not in harmony with it, the subject of the desire; (c) an effort, however undeveloped or misdirected, so to adjust the conditions of the real world as to procure satisfaction of the desire. Let us now turn for a moment to consider the generic nature of our thought. Here too we find the same general characteristic, a relation between a subject and a world of manifold facts, of which at first it is conscious simply as alien to itself, but which it is in constant process of adjusting to itself or making its own. This is no less true of thought in the form of speculative understanding, the process of learning to know facts and their relations, than it is true of it in the practical form of giving effect and reality to ideas. We have already seen how it is only for a self-conscious soul that the senses reveal facts or objects at all. The same self-consciousness which arrests successive sensations as facts to be attended to, finds itself baffled and thwarted so long as the facts remain an unconnected manifold. That it should bring them into relation to each other is the condition of its finding itself at home in them, of its making them its own. This establishment or discovery of relations--we naturally call it establishment when we think of it as a function of our own minds, discovery when we think of it as a function determined for us by the mind that is in the world--is the essential thing in all understanding. It is involved in those perceptions of objects which we are apt improperly to oppose to acts of understanding, but which all imply the discursive process of consciousness, bringing different sensuous presentations into reation to each other as equally related to the single conscious subject; and it is involved in those inferences and theories of relations between relations which we commonly treat as the work of understanding par excellence. Whatever the object which we set ourselves to understand, the process begins with our attention being challenged by some fact as simply alien and external to us, as no otherwise related to us than is implied in its being there to be known; and it ends, or rather is constantly approaching an end never reached, in the mental appropriation of the fact, through its being brought under definite relations with the cosmos of facts in which we are already at home. (§ 132 ¶ 1)