The theory of self-consciousness depicts subjects’ activities in unifying experiences under concepts, encountering contradictions that these concepts entail in relations towards objects andother subjects, and acting practically to give reality, or a changed reality,to the concepts. From his earliest writing to his critiques of the failures of 1848, Bauer regularly differentiates two types of self-consciousness:the merely subjective, which cannot transpose itself into actuality, and which remains a mere Sollen or an impotent “ought” above it; and the subjective-infinite as the vehicle for the actualisation of reason, as a moment in a syllogism whereby the universal is mediated with the particular.