They constitute therefore the circle of reality and of life, which is duality-unity of thought and being, of subject and object, in such a way that to think the subject is the same as to think the subject of an object, and to think an object is the same as to think the object of a subject. In truth, it sometimes seems strange and almost impossible that such hard and difficult questions should have arisen as to the objectivity of knowledge, and as to whether thought attains to being, or whether there be a being beyond thought. Thought is such, precisely because it affirms being, and being is such, precisely because it is generated by a thought. It is only when we remember that in those questions were included others of a very difficult and intricate nature, concerning divine transcendency and the content of the concept of nature (gnoseological questions, which it is the glory of modern philosophy to have asked and solved);—it is only then that we understand how the relation of thought and being, of knowing and of willing, has also become obscure. Kant was forced to come to a stop before the mystery of reality, because he had not altogether conquered transcendency, nor altogether surpassed the false conception of nature as ens, given by the naturalists. It revealed itself to him, not as a circle, but as an assemblage of lines diverging or joining to infinity. Hegel made two of will and nature, owing to the insufficiency of his gnoseological theory relating to the natural sciences, and was led to posit a Philosophy of nature in opposition to a Philosophy of the spirit, thus permitting to exist a form of non-mediate dualism, after he had destroyed so many, or making it mediate in the artificial manner to which we have referred. The shadows of that gnoseology having been dispersed, the relation between theory and practice, subject and object, appears in full light; and the answer becomes very simple to the question as to how, when everything is unconvertible relation of condition and conditioned, thought and being are reciprocally condition and conditioned, and as to how the vicious circle is avoided. The criticism of vicious circles includes in itself and affirms the idea of a circularity that is not vicious; thought and being are not a succession of two finites, but an absolute relation, that is, the Absolute itself. To express ourselves mythologically, if the creation of the world be the passage from chaos to cosmos, from not-being to being, this passage does not begin either with the theoretic or with the practical, with the subject, or with the object, but with the Absolute, which is the absolute relation of the two terms. In the beginning was neither the Word nor the Act; but the Word of the Act and the Act of the Word.
It is well to state again that in consequence of the relation and correlation established, all the questions as to the primacy of thought or will, of the contemplative or active life, and speaking more empirically, of the thinker or the man of action, disappear. To pose such problems is as though one were to ask which of the two semicircles of a circle has precedence. Similar questions, always insoluble or badly solved, have their origin in internal obscurity as to the fundamental correlation. When man has attained to the summit of knowledge (a summit that is certainly not Art; nor, strictly speaking, Philosophy, but History, the knowledge of the concrete real, that is, the actuality of philosophy), when he has completely penetrated the actual situation, can he perhaps stop at this point and say hic manebimus optime? Can he arrest life which is raging and demanding to be continued? And if he succeed in suspending it for an instant in thought, why has he suspended, if not to continue it? Knowledge is not an end, but an instrument of life: knowledge that did not serve life would be superfluous and harmful.—On the other hand, when a man has willed and has thrown himself into action, when he has produced another piece of life, can he blindly continue to produce life for ever? Would not blindness impede the production itself? Therefore he must rise from life to knowing, if he wish to look in the face the product that he has lived, and surpass it with thought, for which life is now means and instrument. Knowledge serves life and life serves knowledge; the contemplative life, if it do not wish to become insipid ease, must lead to activity, and that activity, if it do not wish to become an irrational and sterile tumult, must lead to contemplation. Reality, in specifying aptitudes, has formed men of thought and men of action, or of prevailing thought or prevailing action, these not superior to those, for they are collaborators.—Thus the discussions as to whether human progress be moral or intellectual, or whether the propelling force be the practical and economic activity, or philosophy, or religion (Buckle, Kidd, etc.), are shown to be vain.
It is rather to be considered that from this bond between theory and practice is obtained a pragmatism of a new sort, of which the pragmatists have never thought, or at least have not been able to distinguish from the others and to give it value. If Life condition Thought, we have in this the apodictic demonstration of the always historically conditioned form of every thought; not only of Art, which is always the art of a time, of a soul, of a moment; but also of Philosophy which can solve only those problems presented by Life. Every philosophy reflects and cannot but reflect the preoccupations, as they are called, of a definite historical moment; and this, not in the quality of its solutions (in which case it would be and is indeed bad philosophy), but in the quality of its problems. Thus it is at once contingent and eternal, mortal and immortal, extratemporal and living only in time and history.
Finally, with the establishment of the duality-unity of the theoretical and the practical, we have demonstrated that which at the beginning of the exposition had only been asserted and presupposed: namely, why a practical form of the spirit must be placed beside the theoretical,[5] and why there is no third form beyond these, whether it be called feeling or by any other name.[6] The theoretical form postulates the practical, because the subject postulates the object; but the spirit does not postulate a third form intermediate between the two, or unity of the two, because it is itself precisely mediator and unity of itself, subject-object.
[1] Section I.
[2] Section II.
[3] Section I. c. 3.
[4] Section I. c. 4.
[5] Section I. c. 1.
SECOND PART
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS SPECIAL FORMS
FIRST SECTION
THE TWO PRACTICAL FORMS: ECONOMIC AND ETHIC
I
DISTINCTION OF THE TWO FORMS IN THE PRACTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
All that has been developed in the preceding book concerns the practical activity in general: therefore no account has been taken of the special distinctions of the practical forms, as though there were none, or they have only been alluded to as something problematical; and when exemplifications have been given, recourse has been had indifferently to one or to the other of the forms commonly admitted, whether or no they are to be held philosophically distinguishable. Now, on the contrary, we affirm in an explicit manner that the spirit, which we have seen distinguished as theoretical and practical, is sub-distinguished as practical spirit, into two forms, of which the first may be called utilitarian or economic, the second moral or ethical.
In affirming this sub-distinction, we are obliged to renounce (as we have already done for the practical in respect to the theoretical) a demonstration by the psychological method, which has already shown itself to be vicious. If indeed it were applicable in this field, we should doubtless be able to strike the intellect and persuade the soul for a moment, by pointing to the spectacle of life as a demonstration of the two forms, economic and ethic, showing on the one hand, farmers, commercial men, speculators, conquerors of men and of territories, wielders of the word or of the sword as instrument of dominion; and, on the other hand, educators, benefactors, disinterested and self-sacrificing men, martyrs and heroes; on the one hand, economic institutions (manufactories, mines, exchanges, exploration companies), and on the other moral institutions (educators and schools, charitable societies, orders of Sisters of Charity, or red, white, or blue Cross Companies, and so on). What can be better proof of the reality of the bipartition enunciated? Cannot we touch it, as with the hand? However (as already in the case of the distinction between the theoretical and the practical), what is touched with the hand is not on that account seized by the intellect, and indeed in a little while it also escapes the hand which had thought to be its master. For when we better observe the individuals who seemed to be merely economic, they seem to be also moral, and inversely;—moral institutions are also economic, and economic moral The benefactor calculates and wishes to attain his object with the same cupiditas as the peasant, all intent upon gain; and the peasant in his turn is ennobled in his chase after lucre by the dignity of labour and by the moral impulses that sustain it;—all charitable institutions are economic undertakings, and economic undertakings are subject to moral laws, so that in drawing up accounts there is no knowing where is that material distinction between the economic and the ethical activities. The truth is that here too it is not possible to start from contingent facts and from their classes with empirical limitations, to attain to philosophical distinctions, but that it is necessary to start from these, in order to interpret contingent facts, and finally to understand also the mode of formation of empirical classes. For this reason the psychological method revolves in a circle that is effectively vicious.
Neither is it possible to proceed with the method that we shall call deductive solely; that is, we see the necessity of the two sub-forms of the practical activity, which, being the object of the subject and therefore in every way analogous to the activity of the subject, that is, to the theoretical, must have a duplication of forms answering to the duplication of the theoretical activity into æsthetic and logical, and cannot posit the universal practical without positing the individual that shall be its vehicle. This deduction, although in every way correct and rigorous, cannot be convincing, save when it is also demonstrated that it responds to fact as revealed by observation, that is, when deduction is also induction, as the speculative method demands.
Leaving, therefore, on this occasion also, the deductive proof to the complete development of the theory, we shall begin by appealing to observation of self, in order that every one may verify in himself the existence of the two different forms of volitional acts, termed by us economic and ethic. The economic activity is that which wills and effects only what corresponds to the conditions of fact in which a man finds himself; the ethical activity is that which, although it correspond to these conditions, also refers to something that transcends them. To the first correspond what are called individual ends, to the second universal ends; the one gives rise to the judgment concerning the greater or less coherence of the action taken in itself, the other to that concerning its greater or less coherence in respect to the universal end, which transcends the individual.
If we wish to recognize only the moral form of activity, we soon perceive that it draws with it the other, from which it is distinct; for our action, although universal in its meaning, cannot but be something concrete and individually determined. What is put in practice is not morality in universal, but always a determinate moral volition: as Hegel remarked in a different connection, we do not eat fruit in general, but cherries, pears, plums, or, these cherries, these pears, these plums; we hasten to comfort in this or that way an individual, made in this or that way, who finds himself in this or that state of misfortune; we do justice at this or that point of time and space to individual beings on a definite matter. If a good action be not solely our individual pleasure, it must become so: otherwise, how could we carry it out? Thus, by closer examination, we realize that our action always obeys a rational law, even when its moral law is suppressed, so that, when every inclination that transcends the individual has been set aside, we do not on that account remain the prey of caprice. We shall desire only our own will, we shall follow only our own individual inclination; but, even so, it is necessary to will this will and this inclination coherently, not to undulate between two or more volitions at the same time. And if we succeed in really obtaining our desire, if, while the moral conscience is for a moment suspended within us, we abandon ourselves to the execution of a project of vengeance and attain to it in spite of many obstacles, thus executing a masterpiece of ability, a practical masterpiece; even when, in this case, populus non plaudit, we for our part certainly nos nobis plaudimus, and feel most satisfied, at least so long as lasts the suspension of the moral consciousness; for we have done what we willed to do, we have tasted, though but for a little while, the pleasure of the gods. Whereas if, although we follow our desire, we do something different from it, or mingle several mutually exclusive desires with one, and having decided not to drink wine, for example, in order to obey the advice of the doctor and to remain in good health, we yet yield to the wish to drink it, that pleasure is, so to say, poisoned by preoccupation, the taste is at the same time distaste, unless we succeed in forgetting for some moments the advice of the doctor, or think that very possibly he does not know what he is saying. We continually apply the same criterion to the incidents of life; actions and individuals, of whom we cannot morally approve, drag from us sometimes cries of admiration for the ability with which they have conducted themselves, for the firmness that they display, worthy (as is said) of a better cause. The Epicurean Farinata, who raised himself erect on his red-hot bed, or the impious Capaneus who cursed Jove beneath the rain of punishing fire, obtain from us that esteem which we refuse to those sad souls who lived without infamy and without praise. Art has celebrated in tragedies and poems the strong characters of great criminals, but it has turned to ridicule in comedies little criminals, the violent who show themselves timid, the astute who let themselves be cheated.
As we cannot fail to recognize this form of the practical activity, quite individual, hedonistic, utilitarian, and economic, and the importance that it possesses, joined to or separated from morality, as the case may be, and the special practical judgments that have their origin in it (the judgment of convenience, whether it be called utilitarian or economic), so it would be impossible not to recognize the moral form. Yes, the volitional act satisfies us as individuals occupying a definite point of time and space, but if it fail to satisfy us at the same time as beings transcending time and space, our satisfaction will be ephemeral and will rapidly be changed into dissatisfaction. To one desire succeeds another, and to this another, and so on to infinity; but the one is different from the other, and the new either condemns the old or is by it condemned. If we succeed in arranging our pleasures in series and classes, and in subordinating and connecting them, certainly there will be some gain; but the gain will not have been a true one on this occasion either. We shall at the most be able to guide our life according to some plan, and for a certain time that has not the exactitude of the moment; instead of the instantaneous will to which succeeds a different will, we shall have general ends for which we shall work. We shall propose, for instance, to do certain work and to abstain from doing certain other work, in order to marry a loved one, to win a seat in Parliament, or to obtain literary fame. But those ends are also merely contingent (they are general, not universal), and consequently cannot assuage our thirst. When we all have attained to them, we shall experience le déboire that la cueillaison d'un rêve au cœur qui l'a cueilli always leaves behind. The company of the fair beloved will weary, the political ambition realized will leave the soul empty, literary fame will seem the shadow of vanity. Perhaps too, we shall change our side, like the sick man who cannot rest on his bed of feathers, and begin to follow other ends; the lover deluded with matrimony will turn to other loves; the ambitious man, weary of political life, will think of new ambitions, or of that of not having any, and of retiring to so-called domestic peace; the seeker for literary fame will long for ease, silence, and forgetting. But in vain: dissatisfaction persists. And it will always persist, and pallid Care will always sit behind us, on the croup of our horse, if we are not able to tear from the contingent its character of contingent, breaking its spell, and bringing ourselves to a full stop in that progressus ad infinitum from thing to thing, from pleasure to pleasure, to which it impels us, if we be not able to place the eternal in the contingent, the universal in the individual, duty in desire. Then only do we acquire that internal peace, which is not in the future, but in the present, because eternity is in the moment, for him who knows how to place it there. Our actions will always be new, because reality always places new problems before us, but if we accomplish them with lofty souls, and with purity of heart, seeking in them that which surpasses them, we shall on every occasion possess the Whole. Such is the character of the moral action, which satisfies us, not as individuals, but as men, and as individuals only in so far as we are men; and in so far as we are men, only by means of individual satisfaction.
Those men in whom the moral consciousness is wanting, or is confused and intermittent, make us fearful—fearful for ourselves, obliged to be on our guard against them and to ward off their snares and injuries, and fearful for them, for if they have not already fallen the prey to the most terrible torments, they certainly will do so. They are like people dancing unconsciously upon ground that has been mined; the conscious spectator trembles for them, they do not; but if by chance they escape the danger, they will be retrospectively horrified when they look back. The inebriation evaporates and the clear outlines of reality reappear, but that which restores form to those outlines is the eternal, not the contingent, morality, not desire. We see this take place in an intense form in what are called conversions, followed by the intention of leaving the world and its false joys and retiring to a cloister; or, without metaphor, of becoming regenerated, of beginning a new life with new ideal presuppositions. But intensive conversions are catastrophes which occur, like popular revolutions, when continuous evolution is impeded. The wise man is converted and renewed at every moment, without the solemnity of a conversion, and with the memorare novissima he retains in the contingent, his contact with the eternal. He knows that he must love things and creatures one by one, each in its individuality, for he who does not love thus is neither good nor bad, not even being a man. He will wish for literary fame, political power, matrimony, according to his aptitudes and to the conditions in which he finds himself; but he will wish for all these things without wishing for them; he will wish for them, not for themselves, but for that which they contain of universal and constant; he will love them in God, ready to abandon them immediately their ideal content shall have left them; he will seriously desire them with all ardour for themselves, but only when their self is also "his other self." No thing, no creature possesses unconditioned value, which belongs only to that which is neither thing nor creature. The value of our individual life is conditioned for each of us, and we must guarantee and defend it as vehicle of the universal, and we must be ready to throw it away, as a useless and pernicious thing, when it does not serve this end, or rebels. But the value of every being dear to us is not less conditioned, and Jesus said with reason, when preparing himself for his divine mission, that he had come to separate men from their wives, their sons, their friends, and from their native land. That separation in union, that union in separation, is the moral activity, individual and universal.
Thus it happens that art, which has celebrated strong characters, able men and affairs well conducted, has also celebrated, and with greater liveliness, those strong men who have placed their strength at the service of that other strength which surpasses them and makes them eternal. For this reason, no embittered soul, no sceptic and pessimist remains long firm in his negation of all moral light; such negations are indeed as a rule true amantium irae. The singer of the lesser Brutus who had thus ferociously imprecated:
Foolish Virtue, hollow mists and fields
Of restless ghosts
Are thy schools, and Repentance turns her back upon
thee, ...
is the same who, on witnessing a slight act of generosity, exclaims with emotion:
Fair Virtue, when my spirit becomes aware of thee,
It exults, as at a joyous event....
The coldest and most self-contained philosophers, when they speak of it, find themselves sometimes impelled to adopt a poetic tone, and Aristotle will say of Justice that it is "a more wonderful thing than Hesperus or the Morning Star,"[1] and Emmanuel Kant will compose an apostrophe to Duty, and will write at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill the soul with ever new and ever increasing veneration and admiration the more often and the longer reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me, and the moral law within me." And even the great mass of rhetoric that has for its object virtue or the moral law is a homage rendered to this supreme force of life, reality of reality.
The impossibility of suppressing the economic or the moral form of the activity in our practical consciousness, the continual appeal that the one makes to the other, the revolving of our practical judgment about the two aspects, both of them necessary, of the useful and the honest, energy and goodness, pleasure and duty, explain why the Psychology and the Description of practical life have constituted the two kinds of types and classes, of economic and of moral men, of economic and of moral institutions. Such rough and approximate distinctions have however at bottom, in this as in other cases, an intimate and rigorous distinction, which every one will find evident in himself, if he look inward upon himself and fix his gaze persistently on the universal forms of the spirit that acts within him.
II
CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ETHICAL FORM
The distinction of the two forms, well known to the inner consciousness, will appear more clearly when we examine the reasons for which the one or the other of them has been denied. We say the one or the other, because we have now freed ourselves from the obligation of refuting the theses that have their origin in presuppositions, both materialistic and intellectualiste, and therefore deny the moral and economic activities, either because they do not admit the concept of spiritual activity itself, or because they do not admit the more special conception of practical activity. The greater number of those who deny morality are nothing but mechanicists, empiricists, materialists, and positivists, to whose brains not only do economy and morality appear inconceivable, but also art and science and, in short, every spiritual value. They ask: Where is this moral principle of which you discourse? Point it out to us with your finger. But they also ask: Where are the categories or the pure concept? Where is the æsthetic synthesis and the pure intuition? Where is the a priori of perception and of history? Where are all these fine things you talk of as though they existed, and that we neither see nor touch?—And for our part, we can henceforth let them say what they will, only praying in our hearts that God may illuminate them and make them discover (at least when they are near to death and the dense veil of their bodies has become more thin) that if the universals were things that it was possible to perceive as we do individual things, they would not be universals.
When the double assumption of a spiritual activity and of a practical form of it has been admitted, it is not possible to do otherwise than either to deny the economic for the moral form, or the moral for the economic. What might seem to be a third possibility, that of denying the two forms, is reducible to the first, because, when the distinction of the terms has been suppressed, there remains nothing but the practical activity considered in general, which coincides with the individual and economic activity. We shall begin then with the examination of the negation of morality for economy, which is the thesis of utilitarianism. Those same materialists have recourse to utilitarianism when they wish to present some sort of a Philosophy of the practical, but with what little right they avail themselves of such aid, is clear from what has already been said: the useful is always value and teleology, and materialism, in all its sub-forms and varieties, is incapable of positing the smallest concept of value and finality.
Utilitarianism affirms that no other volition exists save that which answers to the merely individual determination, or, as it is also expressed, to the pleasure of the individual, understanding by pleasure, not the generic pleasure that also accompanies moral satisfaction in the individual, but that which is exclusively individual. Actions, therefore, as it says, are what concern it, not their motives, that is, the motive of the individuality of the act abstractly conceived, not that of the spirit become concrete in it; thus, not killing for fear of punishment and not killing because repugnant to one's own conscience, become the same thing. They are the consequences of different conditions, but in both cases of the same motive, which is personal convenience. And as there does not exist a pleasure that cannot be and is not substituted for a different pleasure, so there is not an action, however moral it be called, that cannot be interrupted and changed, when different conditions present themselves. Every action, every man has his price: it is all a matter of discovering what that price is. He who seems to place the glory of his country above all other aspirations, although he cannot, for example, be corrupted by money, by vanity, or by pleasure, will yet always have in him some weak point that a more expert corrupter will discover or be able to discover; and when the discovery has been made and the suitable transaction proposed, the glory of his country will be abandoned, because it has been well compensated for by something else. This way of looking upon human actions has appeared to be concrete, exact, rational; and the utilitarian theory, if it have often been called hedonistic, and sometimes even æsthetic (understanding by æsthetic, individual pleasure), is also wont to be decorated with the name of ethical or practical rationalism, rational morality.
All would go very well, and the practical activity would in this way be entirely explained and unified, if we did not at every moment of life run against the distinction between mere pleasure and duty, between the useful and the honest action, and if there did not arise in our conscience an invincible distinction between the things that have a price and those that have none, and if an abyss did not differentiate among apparently similar actions that which has a merely utilitarian from that which has a moral motive. The utilitarians even (who, although bad philosophers, are men, and as such carry at the bottom of their souls a far better philosophy than they profess in books and in the schools) are not able to suppress that distinction in themselves and to deny all recognition to the power of morality, to which, as men, they submit at every moment. How then are they to behave? How are they to explain the genesis of that distinction which, by the premises that they have posited, cannot be other than illusion? What is there that gives effective existence to the fallacious category of morality, side by side with the veracious one of utility?
There have been several attempts to solve that hard resisting term of morality. The first, which was logically bound to present itself, was that of considering facts called moral as nothing but empirical groups of utilitarian facts, and of explaining the false category as an hypostasis of those empirical groups, arbitrarily reduced to a rigorous and philosophical concept. Banking, usury, commerce, industry, agriculture, and labour are empirically distinguished, yet are all economic facts. Courage, prudence, temperance, chastity, justice, modesty are empirically distinguished, yet are all moral facts. Why not unite the two series, and recognize the unity and continuity of nature by the insertion among them of other types and terms? Morality is also utility, but the utility of the greater number; interest is interest, but well understood; pleasure is pleasure, but pleasure of greater duration and quantity, preferred to another less intense, or more fugitive; egoism, egoism of family, of race, of human race, egoism of species, altruism; eudemonism, but social eudemonism, enjoyment, but enjoyment of sympathy, utility, but utility of conforming, not to one's own individual judgment, but to that of public opinion. Thus are moral facts included in utilitarian, in the same way as the number a hundred thousand is not less a number than two or three and the others inferior to it, because it is composed of three and of two and of other numbers less than itself. Cæsar Borgia murders his brother and thus gets rid of a rival both in love and in politics, that is, he seeks his advantage; but Giordano Bruno also seeks his own advantage, and nothing else, when he allows himself to be burned in order to assert his philosophy, because, for one constituted as he, with that demoniacal fury of his for philosophical truth, the pyre must have seemed a very miserable and negligible thing, just as his brother's blood seemed to Cæsar Borgia. Call the one of these actions utility of a complexity of ten and the other utility of a complexity of a hundred, or give to the complexity a hundred the name of morality, of well-understood self-interest, of sympathy, of altruism, and so on, and to the complexity of ten that of utility, of individual interest, of egoism: the two actions will not thus have been declared of a different nature.
But the fact is that they have already been declared of a different nature by the utilitarians themselves. No one, indeed, will have been deceived with the ingenious phraseology excogitated: well-understood interest is no longer mere self-interest; the egoism of species is not egoism, durable pleasure is not mere pleasure. The difference between the one term and the other is not quantitative, and even where a greater quantity is talked of, a greater duration, a greater number, arithmetical definitions are not posited, but symbols pointing to qualitative differences. There is a difference, not of complexity but of nature, between the action of Cæsar Borgia and that of Giordano Bruno; there is no common measure between baseness and moral elevation as there is between undulating plains and mountains. The two series, of empirical utilitarian concepts and of empirical moral concepts, are not only irreducible to a single series, but remain obstinately distinct and irreducible. All that can be done, and has been done, is to unify them verbally; and in this the utilitarians have shown themselves as bold as it was possible to be in so miserable an enterprise. But the identity or similarity of words does not suffice to cancel the profound distinctions of things.
There would have been an immediate passage from the consciousness of the puerility of such identifications to the recognition of a distinct ethical form, if purpose and prejudice had not made resistance, prompting, on the contrary, the search for new expedients for setting themselves free in theory from the tedious and recurring phantom of morality. On this occasion also these expedients must have been just two: that is, to declare morality or concept extraneous to the practical, or intrinsic to it indeed, but contrary. The first was attempted, but feebly, when morality was spoken of as the fantasticality of poets, as the dream or rosy illusion caressed in life. No attention was paid to the fact that what the poet imagines cannot be contradictory and absurd, but must indeed be founded in the reality of life and in the nature of things; and that morality is not the æsthetic form in which it is reproduced and represented, but practical form or action. But the unmaintainability of this attempt was too evident for its success. The other expedient, on the contrary, has always had and still has great success. This turns morality into a practical contradictory concept, that is, into something certainly practical, but without motive, incoherent, and in contradiction to the healthy development of the practical. It is true that it is usually enunciated in very different words from those used by us. They speak as follows: What is called a good and virtuous action is nothing but the product of the association between certain acts that are for us the means to a pleasure, and that pleasure itself; so that gradually, even where the primitive pleasure is absent, those acts are sought and repeated for themselves, as though in themselves pleasurable. The savage fought against the enemies who assailed his tribe, that he might not be made a slave or sacrificed to the idol of another tribe, that is to say, in order to defend his personal liberty or his life; but later on, man, forgetting that the tribe or the city or the State were simple means for protecting life and goods, defends them for themselves and allows himself to be despoiled and slain for his country. In the same way (to employ the classical example), money is first sought as a means to enjoyment, and to form a supply for procuring a life more comfortable and secure; but by degrees he who amasses money turns in his soul the means into the end, and becomes avaricious, that is, he finds delight in the mere possession of money, and sacrifices for that all his other joys, even an easy life, food, house and sleep, which he originally intended that money should obtain for him. Morality arises entirely from a similar process of association between means and end, and the case of the miser explains by analogy every act of virtue that cannot be directly reduced to simple pleasure and individual utility.
Now the association here discussed is neither that of logic nor of æsthetic, nor valid association, synthesis, but irrational and fallacious association. It is only possible to exchange means for end as the result of a bad association of ideas: therefore that association is folly and stupidity, as the miser adduced as an example is stupid and foolish, being called "miser" precisely for this reason, with the intention of blaming him (for this word does not mean "economic" or "provident"). And behold! morality should be defined as that which is practically irrational, foolish, stupid, the product of illusion and confusion, or the contrary of the practical activity, which is clear-sightedness, rationality, wisdom. Thus defined, it is at the same time annulled. Indeed, irrationality is that which is condemned to be perpetually subjected to the rational; and what is called the moral man, if he were nothing but a false associator of ideas, would be constantly confuted by the man of good sense, by the utilitarian, who would prevent him from committing the stupidity of sacrificing himself for his children, for his country, or for knowledge; or, were he to persist, would cover him with contempt and ridicule. The fear that to discover its origin would be tantamount to abolishing morality would therefore be perfectly justified in this new sense also; or better, it would not be a question of a fear, but of a fact: morality would be in a state of progressive annulment, as the effect of increasing instruction, both in the individual and in society. It has been replied that neither this fear nor this fact arises, because that false association is indissoluble, being a product of heredity, or, to speak of it in proper terms, it is hereditary stupidity (evolutionistic utilitarianism). But whether inherited or acquired, it is so dissoluble as to be dissolved in the theory proposed: lux facta est, and no one succeeds in obscuring it any longer. If, notwithstanding that pretended light, morality be not dissipated, if recourse be had to the miserable subterfuge of insuperable heredity (which is surpassed at the very moment in which its origin is made clear), this means to say that, for the moralist himself, morality is not the irrational, but something very rational. He does not succeed in identifying it with the merely individually useful, but neither can he reject it as the pure and simple negative of this. And since he does not wish to abandon the utilitaristic hypothesis, there is no other path open to him but that of recourse to mystery.
This is precisely what happens in the last form of utilitarianism, which has seemed to be capricious and extravagant, but is on the contrary profoundly auto-critical, since it reveals the ultimate essence and defect of the doctrine: what is known as theological utilitarianism. Human actions are always inspired by what is merely useful to the individual, and if a number of these seems to diverge from this criterion, this happens because account is not taken of an actual fact, by means of which even the actions which seem to be divergent are reduced to the common measure. This given fact is the life beyond this world, in which God rewards or punishes him who has obeyed or disobeyed his will, in the life of this world. He who in this life seems to resist the impulse of his personal advantage and performs sacrifices of every sort, even to that of his own life, follows equally with the others his personal advantage; and believing in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in the reward and the punishment that await him, he regulates his action according to these actual facts. Intuitionistic Ethic, which places a moral duty at the side of individual pleasure, but indeducible from it, is in reality deduced from individual pleasure, and is likewise turned into rational or utilitarian Ethic by means of the transcendental datum. In this way the solution makes shipwreck in mystery; since God, immortality, the other life, the divine command, punishments and rewards, cannot be defined and justified by means of thought and concept. When utilitarianism becomes theological, it abandons the philosophical field, confessing by so doing its philosophical defeat. And to philosophical consideration the distinction between the individually useful and that which is also superindividual shines out ever more clearly after the many vain attacks of utilitarianism, the affirmation of the moral form, as united and distinct from the utilitarian; the autonomy of Ethic against every form of utilitarianism and every heteronomous Ethic.