Consciousness is the realization of being, and may be identical with being. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno generously extends consciousness to animate and inanimate beings by positing the action of consciousness through the universe of all beings:
We attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits.