Now this reference to self has been omitted in our consideration of empirical evolution. We have taken the purely objective ground of science, and we have admitted what science has told us of how all sorts of things came to be,--how man appeared on the earth, gradually adapted himself to his surroundings and modified them--how sentiments expanded, customs grew, and one institution developed out of another. But science shows us all this only as an external process of events in space and time--a process in which the preceding determines each succeeding state, and all parts are united together. It does not show us the process from the inside. And, in the end, it can do no more than point towards, without reaching, the comprehensive idea of a whole, by reference to which idea all the members of the whole are determined, in such a way that it is insufficient to look upon one as causing another, and with the others making up the aggregate; since each member only exists for the sake of the whole, and the idea of the whole precedes the parts which constitute it.[280] The teleological conception thus necessarily leads us beyond the ordinary categories of science, by which all things are conceived as connected causally in space and time. But the scientific theories that we have been discussing do not recognise this altered point of view; and, without giving any justification for the change of standpoint, lay down the moral law that we ought to aim at the realisation of something which can only be described as a mental conception or idea. Here a double change in point of view is involved. We are no longer considering a process going on outside us, in which the reference to self may be fairly ignored, but we put ourselves in relation to this external order: and we do so, not merely as cognitive, but as active--as the potential source of actions which we say "ought" to be performed by us. [Sidenote: (_a_) made clear in the attempt to trace the genesis of self-consciousness.]