There then results this first and very peculiar form of the transcendental deduction. That part of it which persists in the successive stages rests upon an explicitly developed distinction between empirical and transcendental apperception. Kant teaches, in agreement with Hume, though, as we may believe, independently of his direct influence, that there is no single empirical state of the self which is constant throughout experience.[763] “The consciousness of the self, according to the determinations of our state in inner perception, is merely empirical, and always in process of change.... That which has to be represented as of necessity numerically identical cannot be thought as such through empirical data. There must be a condition which precedes all experience, and renders experience itself possible, if a transcendental pre-supposition of this kind is to be rendered valid.... This pure, original, unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception.”[764] Kant would seem to have first developed this view in a quite crude form. The consciousness of the self, he seems to have held, consists in its awareness of its own unceasing activities. As consciousness of _activity_, it is entirely distinct in nature and in origin from all apprehension of sense impressions.[765] This teaching is a natural extension of the doctrine of the _Dissertation_,[766] that such pure notions as those of possibility, existence, necessity, substance, cause, are “acquired by attending to the actions of the mind on the occasion of experience.” Kant would very naturally hold that consciousness of the identity and unity of the self is obtained in a similar manner. Such, indeed, is the teaching of the section before us. “No knowledge can take place in us ... without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and in relation to which all representation of objects is alone possible.”[767] “It is precisely this transcendental apperception that constructs out of (_macht aus_) all possible appearances, which are capable of coexisting in one experience, a connection of all these representations according to laws. For this unity of consciousness would be impossible if the mind could not become conscious, in the knowledge of the manifold, of the identity of the function whereby it combines it synthetically in one knowledge. Thus the mind’s original and necessary consciousness of the identity of itself is at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances according to concepts, _i.e._ according to rules.... For the mind could not possibly think the identity of itself in the manifold of its representations, and indeed _a priori_, if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its action....”[768]