liar, or a miscreant, he purifies his other self by reflecting it in art. If by sincerity be meant, in the second place, fulness and truth of expression, it is clear that this second sense has no relation to the ethical concept. The law, called both ethical and æsthetic, reveals itself here as nothing but a word used both by Ethics and Esthetic. VII ANALOGY BETWEEN THE THEORETIC AND THE PRACTICAL activity. THE double degree of the theoretical activity, æsthetic The two forms and logical, has an important parallel in the practical of the practical activity, which has not yet been placed in due relief. The practical activity is also divided into a first and second degree, the second implying the first. The first practical degree is the simply useful or economical activity ; the second the moral activity. Economy is, as it were, the Esthetic of practical life; Morality its Logic. If this has not been clearly seen by philosophers; The economicif the correct place in the system of the spirit has not ally useful. been given to the economic activity, if it has been left to wander about in the prolegomena to treatises on political economy, often vague and but little developed, this is due, among other reasons, to the fact that the useful or economic has been confused, sometimes with the concept of the technical, sometimes with that of the egoistical. useful and the Technique is certainly not a special activity of the Distinction spirit. Technique is knowledge; or rather, it is know- between the ledge itself in general which takes this name when it serves technical. as basis, as we have seen it does, for practical action. Knowledge which is not followed, or is supposed not to be easily followed by practical action, is called “pure”: the same knowledge, if effectively followed by action, is called "applied"; if it is supposed that it can be easily followed by a particular action, it is called "applicable Distinction of the egoistic. or technical." This word, then, indicates a situation in which knowledge is, or may easily be, not a special form of knowledge. So true is this, that it would be altogether impossible to establish whether a given order of knowledge were, intrinsically, pure or applied. All knowledge, however abstract and philosophical it may be believed to be, may be a guide to practical acts; a theoretical error in the ultimate principles of morality may be reflected and always in some way is reflected in practical life. One can only speak roughly and unscientifically of certain truths as pure and of others as applied. sense. The same knowledge that is called technical may also be called useful. But the word "useful," in conformity with the criticism of judgements of value made above, is to be understood as used here in a verbal or metaphorical When we say that water is useful for putting out fire, the word "useful" is used in a non-scientific sense. Water thrown on the fire is the cause of its going out: this is the knowledge that serves for basis to the action, let us say, of firemen. There is a link, not of nature, but of simple succession, between the useful action of the person who extinguishes the conflagration and that knowledge. The technique of the effects of the water is the theoretical activity which precedes; the only useful thing is the action of the man who extinguishes the fire. Some economists identify utility, that is to say, merely the useful from economic action or will, with the egoistic, that is to say, with what is profitable to the individual, in so far as individual, without regard to and indeed in complete opposition to the moral law. The egoistic is the immoral. In this case Economics would be a very strange science, standing not beside but opposite Ethics, like the devil facing God, or at least like the advocatus diaboli in the processes of canonization. Such a conception is altogether inadmissible the science of immorality is implied in that of morality, as the science of the false is implied in Logic, science of the true, and a science of unsuccessful expression in Esthetic, science of successful expression. If, then, Economics were the scientific treatment of egoism, it would be a chapter of Ethics, or Ethics itself; because every moral determination implies, at the same time, a negation of its contrary. Further, conscience tells us that to conduct oneself economically is not to conduct oneself egoistically; that even the most morally scrupulous man must conduct himself usefully (economically), if he does not wish to act at hazard and consequently in a manner quite the reverse of moral. If utility were egoism, how could it be the duty of the altruist to behave like an egoist? moral will. If we are not mistaken, the difficulty is solved in a Economic manner perfectly analogous to that in which is solved will and the problem of the relations between expression and concept, Esthetic and Logic. To will economically is to will an end; to will morally is to will the rational end. But whoever wills and acts morally, cannot but will and act usefully (economically). How could he will the rational end, unless he also willed it as his particular end? The converse is not true; as it is not true in æsthetic Pure science that the expressive fact must of necessity be economicity. linked with the logical fact. It is possible to will economically without willing morally; and it is possible to conduct oneself with perfect economic coherence, while pursuing an end which is objectively irrational (immoral), or, rather, an end which would be held to be so at a higher grade of consciousness. Examples of the economic, without the moral character, are Machiavelli's hero Cæsar Borgia, or the Iago of Shakespeare. Who can help admiring their strength of will, although their activity is only economic, and is developed in opposition to what we hold moral? Who can help admiring the Ser Ciappelletto of Boccaccio, who pursues and realizes his ideal of the perfect rascal even on his death-bed, making the petty and timid little thieves who are present at his burlesque confession exclaim: "What manner of man is this, whose perversity neither age, nor infirmity, nor the fear of death which he sees at hand, nor the fear of God before whose judge The economic side of morality. ment-seat he must stand in a little while, have been able to remove, nor to make him wish to die otherwise than as he has lived?" The moral man unites with the pertinacity and fearlessness of a Cæsar Borgia, of an Iago, or of a Ser Ciappelletto, the good will of the saint or of the hero. Or, rather, good will would not be will, and consequently not good, if it did not possess, in addition to the side which makes it good, also that which makes it will. So a logical thought which does not succeed in expressing itself is not thought, but at the most a confused presentiment of a thought beyond yet to come. It is not correct, then, to conceive of the amoral man as also anti-economical, or to make of morality an element of coherence in the acts of life, and therefore of economicity. Nothing prevents us from conceiving (an hypothesis which is verified at least during certain periods and moments, if not during whole lifetimes) a man altogether without moral conscience. In a man thus organized, what for us is immorality is not so for him, because it is not felt as such. The consciousness of the contradiction between what is desired as a rational end and what is pursued egoistically cannot arise in him. This contradiction is anti-economicity. Immoral conduct becomes also anti-economical only in the man who possesses moral conscience. The moral remorse which is the indication of this, is also economical remorse; that is to say, sorrow at not having known how to will completely and to attain that moral ideal which was willed at first, instead of allowing himself to be led astray by the passions. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. The video and the probo are here an initial volo immediately contradicted and overthrown. In the man without moral sense, we must admit a remorse that is merely economic; like that of a thief or of an assassin who, when on the point of robbing or of assassinating should abstain from doing so, not owing to a conversion of his being, but to nervousness and bewilderment, or even to a momentary awakening of moral consciousness. When he has come |