But it is the second change in point of view which needs special emphasis here--the change from the point of view of science to that of morality. Taken in its bare form, this is perhaps little more than a confusion of thought. The fact of things being of a certain constitution, and of their progress tending in a certain direction, cannot of itself supply a law for the exercise of our activity. But the view is associated with a theory of the nature of human action which seeks to bring it into the strict line of natural development. Just as empirical psychology attempted to treat self-consciousness as a stage in the evolution of experience or knowledge, so the empirical theory of morality, aided by the doctrine of evolution, tries to show how the action which is called moral has been developed out of purely physical or reflex action. But this theory of the development of moral action is really open to the same objection as that which was urged against the theory which evolves self-consciousness from the unconscious. The objection to the latter was, that experience, itself constituted by consciousness, is made to produce the condition of its own possibility; and a similar confusion is involved in attempting to develop moral action out of merely physical or reflex action. The only case of true psychical or conscious action is that in which there is a conscious determination of end and means; and action of this kind implies the same relation to self-consciousness as that by which knowledge is constituted. The relation is, however, manifested in a different way: it is not an apprehension of the manifold of impression into the unity of consciousness, but the externalisation of self-consciousness in realising a conceived end or idea. Now, in so far as physical and psychical facts are phenomena of experience--and they have no other existence, at least none that can have any intelligible meaning given to it--they presuppose self-consciousness; for it is only in relation to it that experience is possible. That is to say, their existence logically implies a reference to a subject whose active externalising manifestation is the determination of means and end which constitutes moral (as distinguished from merely natural) action. So far, therefore, from our being able to trace the development of moral action from the simpler phenomena of natural action, we find that these, in their most rudimentary form, by virtue of their being phenomena of experience, imply and receive their reality from the self-consciousness which is the differentiating quality both of knowledge and of moral action. [Sidenote: 5. The unity of self-consciousness:] [Sidenote: (_a_) as making possible the transition from knowledge to morality;]