It has been argued above that both knowledge and morality are expressions of self-conscious activity: in it these different manifestations find an element of fundamental identity. But it may be maintained, further, that this "unity of self-consciousness" is not merely the unity of the different states of an individual, but that it is an element which transcends the difference by which concrete individuals are distinguished from one another. If this view can be carried out, it seems to lead us to attribute to other men something more than a "similar consciousness"[289] to our own, and to make us look on all self-conscious beings as sharing in, or manifesting, in various imperfect ways, one identical self-consciousness. From this point of view, self-realisation would be established as no mere individual end. The first law of morality would be not the "natural" impulse for each to take care of himself in the struggle for life, but, on the contrary, the sublation of that distinction between the particular ego and other individuals which would admit of the one using the others as mere means to his own advancement. His true end is the same as theirs: the realisation of the self-consciousness in which both partake--its realisation, that is to say, not in one individual only, but wherever it is manifested.[290] This is the rationale of what the empirical theory of evolution tries to establish by pointing to the growing harmony in feeling and interest between the individual and society. What evolution really shows is the gradual manifestation in actual volition of the identity of nature in all men.[291] I do not say that this fundamental identity of nature does away with all conflict between self-realisation in one's self and in others; but it does much, if it establishes the principle that the realisation of one's own nature involves the realisation of that of others. As Schäffle says, "the moral law is the direction of the will to the genuinely human as humanity;" and "this is a transcendental element embedded in the hearts of all men--though in its basis only, for it is developed and ripened in the course of history."[292] And the more fully self-consciousness is realised, the clearer does it become that its complete realisation implies that "kingdom of ends" spoken of by Kant, in which all self-conscious beings are at once subjects and sovereign. [Sidenote: (_c_) as showing that the realisation of the end must be progressive.]