It is exactly the same with the first appearance of voluntary movement, and again with that of free moral self-determination. The reaction of the sentient subject upon his sensations is something qualitatively different from the purely mechanical and physical action and {116} reaction of pure matter; although, in order to understand the possibility of a sensation as well as of a voluntary movement, we must admit that the physical qualities of matter must be such as to afford a basis and condition for sentient and reacting beings. That reaction is the reaction of something immaterial upon the material, even if it is entirely caused by the material and bound to the material. Now, with free moral self-determination a new subject comes into existence and activity in the individual, which makes that subject, reacting upon mere sensations and ideas, its object, and, as a new immaterial subjective unity, acts determiningly upon that subject which has just become object. This new subject, considered from the side of its receptivity, we call _self-consciousness_; from the side of its spontaneity, _free moral self-determination_. Whether we consider this freedom predetermined or not, does not at all alter the described fact and the qualitative difference between the form of human moral agency and that of purely animal spontaneity. For even those advocating determination must admit that the morally acting subject distinguishes itself from its object, and does not take its motives to action from the material and from the instinctive life which is bound to the sensual and dependent on it. Now it is true that all these circumstances in organized individuals which serve self-consciousness and free moral self-determination as their condition, presupposition, and basis, all the dispositions of the soul and the manifestations of life found in the animal world, will be worthy of the closest attention even on this account: because they form the basis, the condition, and (if self-consciousness and freedom are once present) an essential {117} part of the contents and object of self-consciousness and moral self-determination. But where the origin of man is discussed, the central point of the investigation is no longer the enumeration of those activities of the soul of man whose analogies we also find in the animal world, but rather in the answer to the question as to how that entirely new manifestation, self-consciousness and moral self-determination, came into existence or could have originated. This question is the more decidedly the central point of the investigation, since this new form, when once in existence, has for its object not only what already appears in the life of the soul of animals, but also receives a new object, which can only be an object of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination, and not of mere consciousness and instinctive life. These new objects are the ideas leading up to the conception of God and moral ideals.