On the whole matter, then, our conclusion must be that there is really a single subject or agent, which desires in all the desires of a man, and thinks in all his thoughts, but that the action of this subject as thinking--thinking speculatively or understanding, as well as thinking practically--is involved in all its desires, and that its action as desiring is involved in all its thoughts. Thus thought and desire are not to be regarded as separate powers, of which one can be exercised by us without, or in conflict with, the other. They are rather different ways in which the consciousness of self, which is also necessarily consciousness of a manifold world other than self, expresses itself. One is the effort of such consciousness to take the world into itself, the other its effort to carry itself out into the world; and each effort is involved in every complete spiritual act--every such act as we can impute to ourselves or count our own, whether on reflection we ascribe the act rather to intellect or rather to desire. If the intellectual act implies attention--and otherwise we cannot ascribe it to ourselves--it implies desire for the attainment of an intellectual result, though the result be attained as quickly as, for instance, the meaning of a sentence in familiar language is arrived at upon attention being drawn to it. If the desire is consciously for an object--and this again is the condition of its being imputable to ourselves--it implies, as we have seen, an intellectual apprehension at least of the difference between the object and its realisation. In all the more important processes of desire the exertion of understanding is implied to a much more considerable extent, just as in every intellectual achievement of importance the action of desire is much more noticeable and protracted than in the case just instanced of intelligent attention to the import of a proposition, heard or read. (§ 136 ¶ 1)