 But now comes philosophical reflection, which denies true self-knowledge to inner perception. It does not care about the temporal being, the individual, but wants to know about its [sc. the individual’s] enduring and fixed foundation. It now discovers itself gradually, viz. that perception utterly lacks the actual soul-essence, the substance of the soul; and that such a substance has to be attached to it in thought…. Nevertheless, the ego remains the genuine, ever selfsame identity of the representing with the represented [thing]. This ego appears as a given, as the most secure and indisputable fact of consciousness. … A peculiar kind of cognition is invented for this: a pure, intellectual power. But if one asks what this [thing] is, which intellectual intuition intuits, there appears the absurd concept of an ego severed from the individual. (SW VI: 186; cf. Beiser 2014: 133)