LAWS

Critique of a formal ethic in this sense: tautologism.

What does the formality of Ethic mean in the new sense? Nothing but this: that it is not necessary to inquirewhat is the ethical principle,but that we must be satisfied with saying thatwhatever it be, it must be universal.But that it must be universal is a proposition which belongs, not to Ethic, but to Logic; the principles of all philosophical sciences must possess the character of universality, the logical as the æsthetic, the principle of Ethic as that of Economic, the moral categoric imperative as the utilitarian categoric. Thus the thesis of formality in the new meaning is reduced to placing at the head of Ethic, not the ethical principle,but the logical exigency of the ethical principle,in the same way that a similar claim in Æsthetic would result in placing at the head of that science, not the formal æsthetic principle, as for example, Intuition-expression, but a formal æsthetic principle, the claim for a law, so made that no form of beauty could ever be excluded from it. Instead of constructing the science, the affirmationof logical necessity, which that construction must obey, is infinitely repeated; but the thesis of formality in the new sense would be better called the thesis oftautologism.

Tautological principles: ideal, chief good, duty, etc., and critique of them.

Besides the formulæ to which we have referred, namely those of thecategoric imperative, of the universal law, of the respect for being, of the rational and of conscience,the formulæ of thechief good, of duty (or of law), of the ideal, of true pleasure, of constant pleasure, of spiritual pleasure, of personal dignity, of self-esteem, of the just mean, of harmony, of proportion, of justice, of perfection, of following nature,and so on, also belong to the tautological principles of Ethic; they are all tautologies, because they do not determine to what object those logical claims are applicable. To ask what is the form of will that produces aconstant, spiritual and truepleasure, which makesperfect, gives self-esteem, satisfies our conscience, strikes the just mean,answers to whatoughtto be done, attains tothe supreme good,and so on, is tantamount to asking,What is the ethical form?This is precisely what must be answered, if we do not wish to fall into tautology, and the reply cannot be the question itself.

Tautological meaning of certain formulæ, material in appearance.

And it is convenient to note here that manyof the formulæ that we have criticized as belonging to material Ethic, have also been frequently-employed as tautological formulæ, that is to say, as symbols and metaphors of the ethical truth to be determined. Theothers,of which altruism speaks, are at bottom not others as physically distinct from us, but others in an ideal sense, that is, as duty surpassing the empirical ego;God,of which religious Ethic speaks, is that indeterminate concept, that logical exigency, which is also called thecategoric imperative; the State or Lifethat one pledges oneself to serve is not this or that State, this or that particular form of life, but the symbol of the ideal; thenatureto be followed is that nature, or ethical principle within us, which the speculative reason must determine. Thus do material principles often progress, ceasing to be such, in order to become tautological, that is, abandoning the possession of undue determination, owing to the consciousness of a want, of a lacuna to be filled.

Conversion of tautological Ethic into material and utilitarian Ethic.

The evil is that tautologism inevitably returns to that undue possession, because, imagining that it has established that ethical principle which it has not established at all, and that it has finally constructed Ethic, of which it has not even laid the foundations, it sets to work toexplain moral and concrete facts by means of that empty form. The consequence of this is that utilitarian motives, as usual, fill the empty space. Why should we not violate a deposit that has been entrusted to us? Perhaps because (as they say) the moral law is a universal law? That does not suffice. Respect for the deposit cannot be deduced from this principle, for a universal law is equally thinkable, according to which is deduced in certain cases a respect for the deposit and in certain other cases the contrary. This then is the fact: that to restore a deposit confided to us may sometimes happen to be a bad action, as, for instance, to restore the weapon entrusted to us, when he who claims it intends to commit suicide or to assassinate. Thus it happens that not knowing how to put an end to the controversy in virtue of the true ethical principle, and wishing nevertheless in some way to use that empty formula, it comes to be filled with the only principle possessed, namely the utilitarian; and the reason given for respecting the deposit is said to be the desirability of respecting for engagements, for the ends of the individual, failing which (it will be said) no business would thenceforth be effected and the world of affairs would languish.

In what sense Ethic should be formal and in what other sense material.

FormalEthic, in the new sense, or as it would be better called, tautological Ethic, might be calledformalistic,owing to its thus falling back into material, heteronomous and utilitarian Ethic, sinceformalismhere (as in Æsthetic and Logic) is the caricature of formality, and almost a sort of materiality. In maintainingformalEthic we do not wish that it should beformalistic; that is, that it should be again covertly material. And we wish that formal Ethic should also be material, always understanding by this that it must give, not the mere logical condition of the ethical principle, butthis ethical principle itselfin its concreteness, determining what moral volition is in its reality.

Tautological Ethic and its connection with Philosophy, either partial or discontinuous.

If the strange idea of an ethical principle that should be formal, in the sense of its not being known exactly what it is and how it is justified, has ever been able to arise, this is due to two erroneous philosophical conceptions, of which one can be calledpartial,the otherdiscontinuousphilosophy. According to the first conception, man is capable of knowing something of reality, certainly, but not all: he perceives and arranges the data of experience by means of the categories, but he is aware of the limitation of his thought and of the impossibility of attaining to the heart of the real, which he does, it is true, end by attaining in a certain way, but only with the heart, not with thought. This being stated, and coming to the case of Ethic, man hears the voice of conscience in himself, the command of the moral law; he cannot think of any sophism to escape it: butprecisely what that law is, he is unable to say; the idea of a divine ordinance of the world which presents itself to his spirit, may also be affirmed by the heart, but never by thought. The second conception is confounded by some thinkers with the first and becomes partial philosophy or agnosticism; but if we observe closely, it is distinct from the other. For here it is not actually asserted that the foundation of morality is unknowable, but it is said to be unknowable in the circle of Ethic, or that such knowledge goes beyond that circle. Ethic establishes the moral law, deduces or arranges beneath it ethical precepts and by means of them judges single actions. Ethic is ignorant as to whether that law really exists, or what may be its precise universal content. It hands this problem over to Metaphysic, or to general Philosophy, which solves it in its own way, or is presumed to be capable of solving it. In this conception, then, there arises a question as to competence and hierarchy between thought and thought, between particular and general philosophy; whereas, in the former, is affirmed the absolute incompetence of thought.

Rejection of both these conceptions.

But we do not run the risk of colliding with the obstacle placed before us with these philosophical views, because we have constantlyrejected them both throughout the whole of our exposition of the Philosophy of the spirit and have demonstrated their falsity. Partial Philosophy is a contradictory concept: thought either thinks all or nothing; and if it had a limit it would have it as thought and therefore as surpassed. Whoso admits something unknowable, declares everything unknowable, and inevitably falls into total scepticism. Nor is the idea of a discontinuous philosophy divided into a whole and its parts, with the whole outside the parts and the parts outside the whole less inconceivable; so that, while Ethic is being studied, the whole (complete Philosophy) seems problematical; and a part (Ethic) can be known to some extent without knowing the whole (the whole of Philosophy). This is a false view, ultimately derived from the empirical sciences, in which it is possible to apprehend one order of phenomena independently of the others; and to apprehend phenomena without explicitly posing or by dismissing to another occasion the philosophical problem as to their truth. Philosophy is a circle and a unity and every point of it is intelligible only in relation to all the others. The didascalic convenience of exposing a group of philosophical problems separately from others—or also (if itplease others, as it has not pleased us) of dividing the exposition into particular philosophical sciences, and into general Philosophy (also called Metaphysic)—should not lead to the misconception that the indivisible is really being divided. The whole of Philosophy is at once enunciated with the first philosophical proposition; and the others that come after will all be nothing but explanations of the first.

The ethical form as volition of the universal.

Therefore, since we have never denied faith to thought, nor broken in pieces the unity of Philosophy, we have no secret to reveal at this point; not even a poor secret, like the exponents of discontinuous Philosophy, who solemnly make known at the end what they have assumed from the beginning. Our formal ethical principle is never empty form that must only now be filled with a content. It is full form, form in the philosophical and universal sense, which is also content and therefore universal content. We have not restricted ourselves to defining the ethical form as universal form, which would have resulted in tautologism; but we have defined itvolition of the universal,thus distinguishing it from the economic form, which is simply volition of the individual. And if we now ask ourselves what is the universal, we must replythat the answer has already been given, and that whoever has not yet understood, whoever indeed has not understood it for some time, will never understand it. The universal has been the object of all our Philosophy of the Spirit, and we have always had to keep it before our eyes, in studying, not only the practical function, but any other function of the spirit; just as we cannot have the idea of the branch of a tree without the idea of the trunk from which it springs and without which there would not be the branch of a tree. That concept, then, is not adeus ex machinato appear unexpectedly at the end of the play and hastily bring it to a conclusion, but the force that has animated it from the first to the last scene.

The universal as the Spirit (Reality, Liberty, etc.).

What is the universal? It is the Spirit, it is Reality, in so far as it is truly real, that is, in so far as it is unity of thought and willing; it is Life, in so far as realized in its profundity as this unity itself; it is Freedom, if a reality so conceived be perpetual development, creation, progress. Outside the Spirit nothing is thinkable in a truly universal form. Æsthetic, Logic, Historic, this very Philosophy of the practical, have demonstrated and confirmed this truth in every way. Every other concept brought forwardreveals itself (and has revealed itself beneath our analysis), either as a feigned universal, or as something contingent that has been abstracted and generalized, or as the hypostasis of certain of our particular spiritual products, such as mathematical formulæ, or as the negation of the Spirit, on which is conferred positive value (first with metaphor and then with metaphysic).

And the moral individual who wills the universal, or that which transcends him as an individual, turns precisely to the Spirit, to real Reality, to true Life, to Liberty. The universal is in concrete the universal individualized, and the individual is real in so far as he is also universal. He is not able to assert one part of himself without asserting the other (under the penalty of stopping half-way,dimidiatus vir,and so of again becoming nothing). But in order to assert them both, he must first posit the one as explicit and the other as implicit, and then make the other also explicit. Man as economic individual, at the first moment (so to speak) of his revealing himself to life and to existence, cannot will, save individually: will his own individual existence. There is no man, however moral he be, who does not begin in this way. How could he ever surpass and finally deny his own individual life, ifhe had not first affirmed it and did not reaffirm it at every instant? But he who should stop at that affirmation of the individual, regarding the first stage of development as the resting-place, would enter into profound contradiction with himself. He should will, not only his own self individualized, but also that self, which, being in all selves, is their common Father. Thus he promotes the realization of the Real, lives a full life and makes his heart beat in harmony with the universe:cor cordium.

The moral individual has this consciousness of working for the Whole. Every action, however diverse, which conforms to ethical duty, conforms to Life; and if, instead of promoting Life, it should depress and mortify it, for that very reason it would be immoral. Where facts seem to demonstrate the contrary, the interpretation of facts is erroneous, since it affirms as a criterion of judgment a life which is not that true life, which, as we know, we serve even by dying—dying as an individual, as a collectivity, as a social class, or as a people. The most humble moral act can be resolved into this volition of the Spirit in universal. Thus it happens that the soul of a simple and ignorant man, altogether devoted to his rude duty, vibrates in unison with that ofthe philosopher, whose mind receives into it the universal Spirit: what the one thinks at that moment, the other does, thus attaining by his own path to that full satisfaction, that act of life, that fruitful conjunction with the Real, which the other has attained to by a different path. It may be said that the moral man is apractical philosopherand the philosopher atheoretic actor.

Moral acts as volitions of the Spirit.

This criterion of the Spirit, of Progress, of Reality, is the intimate measure of our acts in the moral conscience, as it is the foundation, more or less clearly expressed, of our moral judgments. Why do we exalt Giordano Bruno, who allowed himself to be condemned to the stake for asserting his philosophy? Perhaps for the calmness with which he faced the torture? But many fanatics, even malefactors, are capable of this, and it may sometimes even be a simple sensual desire, of which we have seen examples in history and of which a modern Italian poet has lately sung, exalting the beauty of the flame and the voluptuousness of the pyre. By facing death and refusing to deny his philosophy, Bruno contributed to the creation of a larger form of civilization, and for this reason he is not only a victim, but also amartyr,in the etymologicalsense of the word: witness and realizer of a demand of the Spirit in universal.—Why do we praise the charitable man? Perhaps because he yields to the emotion caused by the spectacle of suffering. But emotion in itself is neither moral nor immoral, and thus to yield to it materially is weakness, that is, immorality. The charitable man, when he removes or mitigates suffering, relights a life and reconquers a force for the common work, which both he and the person whom he has benefited, must serve.

Critique of antimoralism.

There is indeed nothing more foolish than antimoralism, so much the fashion in our day; it is an ugly echo of unhealthy social conditions, of one-sided theories ill understood (Marxism, Nietzscheianism). Antimoralism is justified, in so far as it combats moral hypocrisy in favour of effective morality instead of that of mere words, but it loses all meaning when it inflates empty phrases or combines contradictory propositions and preaches against morality itself. By so doing, it thinks to celebrate strength, health and freedom, but on the contrary exalts servitude to unbridled passions, the apparent health of the invalid and the apparent strength of the maniac. Morality (begging pardon of literary immoralists), far from being a pedantic fiction or the consolationof the impotent, isgood blood against bad blood.

Confused tendencies of tautological, material, religious formulæ, etc., toward the Ethic of the Spirit.

We must also declare that this truth concerning the ethical principle understood as will that has for its end the universal or the Spirit, is to some extent confirmed by several of the formulæ that we have criticized, which have erred only in defining it, either confusing altogether the universal and the contingent, or have fallen into tautologism. Those who posit Life, or the interest of the Species, Society or the State, as the end of morality, have in view that Life, that Species, that Society, or that ideal State, which is the Spirit in universal, although they are not able to define it clearly. The same may be said of other formulæ, which often have a better intention at starting than that realized in the development of the relative doctrines, or, on the contrary, a development superior to their bad initial intention.

The Ethic of the Spirit and religious Ethic.

This function of symbol possessed by idealist Ethic, this affirmation that the moral act is love and volition of the Spirit in universal, is to be found above all in religious and Christian Ethic, in the Ethic of love and of the anxious search for the divine presence. This is the fundamental characteristic of religious Ethic, which remains unknown to vulgar rationalists andintellectualists, to so-called free-thinkers, and to frequenters of masonic lodges, owing to their narrow party passion or lack of mental subtlety. There is hardly an ethical truth (and we have already had occasion to refer to this matter) that cannot be expressed with the words that we have learned as children from traditional religion, and which rise spontaneously to the lips, as the most elevated, the most appropriate and the most beautiful; words which are certainly impregnated with mythology, but are also weighty with profound philosophical content. There is without doubt an exceedingly strong antithesis between the idealist philosopher and the religious individual, but it is not greater than that within ourselves, when, in the imminence of a crisis, we are divided in soul and yet very near to unity and to interior conciliation. If the religious man cannot but see in the philosopher his adversary, his mortal foe, the philosopher, on the other hand, sees in him his younger brother, his very self of a moment past. Hence he will feel himself more nearly allied to an austere, emotional, religious Ethic, troubled with phantoms, than to an Ethic that is superficially rationalistic: for this latter is only in appearance more philosophical than the other, since if it possess the merit of recognizing(verbally only, or withpsittacism,as Leibnitz would have said) the supreme rights of reason, yet in plucking thought from the soil in which it has grown and depriving it of vital sap, it exercises them very ill.

Merit of the Kantian Ethic.

I. It is the singular merit of Kant to have put an end, once for all, to every material Ethic, by proving its utilitarian character: a merit that is not cancelled by the lacunæ that exist in other parts of his thought, entangling him unawares in the materialism and in the utilitarianism that he had surpassed. It would be anti-historical to desire to judge a thinker by the contradictions into which he falls and so to declare his work to be a failure and of no importance, when it is only imperfect. There are errors in all the works of man, and error is always contradiction; but he who has the eye of the historian discovers where lies the true strength of a thought and does not deny the light, because of necessity accompanied with shadow. Before Kant, ethic was either openly utilitarian or such that although presenting itself in the deceitful form of Ethic of sympathy, or religious Ethic, was yet reducible toutilitarianism. Kant conducted an implacable and destructive war, not only against admitted utilitarian forms, but also against those that were masked and spurious, called by him material Ethic.

The predecessors of Kant.

In this too, his predecessors are to be found in traditional philosophy of Christian origin, or, if it be preferred, Platonic (opposition of material to formal Ethic can already be observed in the attitude of Aristotle to Plato). If the fathers and the scholastics had been divided as to the question of the relation between moral laws and the divine will, and many of them, especially the mystics, had made that law to depend upon the divine will and upon nothing else, yet views had not been wanting, according to which the power of changing at will the moral laws, that is to say, of changing his own essence, was denied to God, since he could not besupra se.Religious Ethic was cleansed of every admixture of arbitrarism and utilitarianism by this solution, accepted by nearly all religious thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (by Cudworth, by Malebranche, and finally by Leibnitz). On the other hand, we cannot but recognize that many other material formulæ used to be understood in an ideal, or, as we have said, in a symbolical manner; andcertainly that very eudæmonism of Aristotle, toward which Kant showed himself too severe, was not the pleasure and happiness of the hedonists and utilitarians, and the mediety (μεσότης) proposed as the distinctive character of virtue, although without doubt empty and often incoherent, was already almost a formal principle. The same is to be said of the Stoic principle offollowing nature; and coming to the immediate predecessors of Kant, of thatperfectioalready mentioned, which Kant, after wavering a little, reduced to happiness, not, however, without stating that it is a more indeterminate concept than any other. With Kant, however, the point was admitted, that the moral law is not to be expressed in any formula, which contains representative and contingent elements.

Defect of that Ethic: agnosticism.

The defect of the Kantian Ethic is the defect of his whole philosophy: agnosticism, which prevents his truly surpassing either the phenomenon or the thing in itself, leading him, on the one hand, toward empiricism, on the other toward that transcendental metaphysic, which no one had done more to discredit than himself. He combated the concept of the good or supreme good as the principle of Ethic, and he was right in so far as he understood it as object of any sort, of "a good," as of a "thing." But this didnot exempt him from the duty of defining the supreme good as that which is not exhausted in any particular object, or of determining the universal. Now his philosophy was incapable of attaining to the universal.

Critique of Hegel and of others.

Hence the involuntary return to utilitarianism, clearly stated by Hegel in his youthful essay upon natural Right. The practical principle of Kant (remarked Hegel) is not a true but a negative absolute; hence with him the principle of morality becomes converted into immorality: since every fact can be thought in the form of universality, it is never known what fact should be received into the law. In the famous example of the deposit, Kant had said that it is necessary to keep faith as regards the deposit, otherwise there would no longer be deposits.[1]But if there were no more deposits, how would this constitute a contradiction to the form of the law? There would perhaps be contradiction and absurdity for material reasons, but it is already agreed that this is not to be brought up in the argument. Kant wishes to justify property, but he does not attain to more than the tautology, that property, if it be property, must be property, opening the way to the free choice of conceiving at will asduties these or those contingent definitions of property. The moral maxims of Kant, owing to the empirical determinations that they assume, are contradictory, not only of one another, but of themselves. This inevitable degeneration of the Kantian Ethic was called by Hegeltautology and formalism.[2]Other thinkers were also affected by the utilitarianism of the Kantian Ethic: Schopenhauer even declared that his doctrine has no other foundation than egoism, since it can be reduced to the concept of reciprocity, and he protested against the Kantian theory that we should be compassionate to animals, in order to exercize ourselves in the virtue of compassion, judging it to be the effect of the Judæo-Christian views of Kant.[3]Schopenhauer was in some respect right in these observations, although as regards animals we must note that the same attitude is found in Spinoza and in other thinkers and that it derives from material and utilitarian Ethic; and for the rest that it would be very unjust to see nothing but egoism in the categoric imperative of Kant, for this, we repeat, though it constitute its danger, does not constitute its essential character.

Kant and the concept of freedom.

Nevertheless, in Kant himself, in this thinker, so rich in contradictions and suggestions, was indicated the concept which, when elaborated, was to constitute the principle, not merely of tautological and formalistic, but of concrete and formal Ethic, the concept offreedom.By means of this concept Kant enters into the heart of the real and reaches that region of which mysticism and religion had from time to time caught a glimpse and had here and there attained. As the origin of the rigid Kantian ethical conception and of his abhorrence for the material and mundane is to be found in Christianity (and in Paganism), so the origin of the concrete moral idea is to be sought in St. Augustine, and also in St. Paul, in the mystics and in the great French Christians of the seventeenth century; in that virtue of which Pascal wrote asplus haute que celle des pharisiens et des plus sages du paganisme,and it operates with omnipotent hand, by means of which alone is it possibledégager l'âme de l'amour du monde, la retirer de ce quelle a de plus cher, la faire mourir à soi-même, la porter et l'attacher uniquement et invariablement à Dieu.[4]The successors of Kant, especially Fichte and Hegel, closed the circle which he had left open,and altogether excluding transcendency, they made of God freedom and of freedom reality. Fichte, who expelled the phantom of the thing in itself from theoretical philosophy, removed from the categoric imperative the appearance ofqualitas occulta,which it had borne in the Philosophy of the practical, illuminating that tenebrous region, ready to receive any sort of phantasm or superstition, such as belief in a moral law arbitrarily imposed by the divinity.[5]Hegel does not recognize duty and the categoric imperative, but freedom only, and as he says, the free spirit is that in which subject and object coincide and freedom is freely willed.

Ethic in the nineteenth century.

II. After the classical epoch of modern philosophy, in the general regression of Ethic, the concept of the concreteness and universality of the practical principle was also lost. Omitting the utilitarians, who no longer have a place here, it must suffice to record how there was a return either to the formalistic principles, which Hegel criticized in Kant (for instance the principle of the Ethic of Rosmini, therespect for being,afterwards combated by Gioberti), or directly to those material principles which Kant had already excluded. Such are thecompassionofSchopenhauer, thefive practical ideasof Herbart, the love of Feuerbach,benevolenceas the supreme ethical idea of Lotze, thetheologicalmorality of Baader, thelifeof Nietzsche, and the like.

The principles of the first were completed with a religious conception (here too Rosmini may afford an example), and those of the second, when they did not reveal themselves as utilitarian or tautological, showed an obscure tendency toward the Ethic of Freedom. This must not be overlooked in the Ethic of Nietzsche, which despite the rocks and mud that the thought of Nietzsche drags with it, is yet anti-hedonistic and anti-utilitarian and quite full of the sense of Life as activity and power. Positivistic evolutionism is also often unconscious idealism; and the moral actions, united to evolution, can be interpreted as those which correspond to the Spirit in universal. The concepts of the pessimists alone are altogether incapable of idealistic interpretation (for example, Schopenhauer), and those of the semi-pessimist and semi-idealist Hartmann are strangely contradictory. He makes morality to consist of the promotion of civilization, whence so lofty a condition of the spirit can be attained that it will be possible to decree universal suicide by means of the vote of all the world.

The question asked after Kant, whether Ethic should be formal or material, is one that we have made more precise in the other form, whether Ethic should be abstract or concrete, full or empty, tautological or expressive—that is (with even greater precision), whether Ethic can be established before and without a philosophical system and even be reconciled with agnosticism, has no longer been understood, even by its pretended followers, the Neocriticists or Neokantians. These have either believed they had solved it by means of moderate utilitarianism, or by going outside it and denying the most secure result of the Kantian critique of Ethic; or they have discussed it tiresomely, without making a step in advance. Progress indeed was possible on one condition alone: that a philosophical system should be constructed not inferior to that of the postkantian idealists. But this would have been tantamount to demanding the death of neokantianism or neocriticism, which has not only not attempted to surpass the idealistic systems, but has even maintained that we should philosophize without a system, declaring that a system is altogether inconceivable. The Neokantians can thus be recognized as the descendants of Kant; but in the same way asthe last descendant of the Hapsburgs in Spain, who was neither emperor, king, soldier, nor man, could be recognized as the descendant of Charles the Fifth, who was man, soldier, king, and emperor: because, like his great predecessor, he possessed the deformed, hanging lip of the Hapsburgs.

[1]Krit. d. prakt. Vern.pp. 30-31.

[2]Ueb. d. wissensch. Behandlungsarten d. Naturrechts,inWerke,i. 353; cf.Gesch. d. Phil.iii. 533 sqq.

[3]Gründl, d. Moral,inWerke,ed. cit., iii. 538, 542-543.

[4]Lettres prov.1. 5.

[5]System d. Sittenlehre,pp. 49-51.

Definition of law.

Lawis a volitional act, which has for content aseriesorclassof actions.

Philosophical and empirical concepts of society.

This definition excludes above all from the concept of law a determination that is generally considered essential to it, the determination ofsociety; this amounts to saying that it also extends the concept of law to the case of theisolated individual.But in order that there may be no misunderstanding in relation to a point like this of the highest importance, it will be well to show that the word "society" has a double meaning, philosophical and empirical, and if we exclude its empirical sense from the concept of law, it would neither be possible nor our wish, to exclude its philosophical sense. Reality is unity and multiplicity together, and an individual is conceivable, in so far as he is compared with other individuals, and the process of reality is effective, in so far as individuals enter intorelations with one another. Without multiplicity there would not be knowledge, action, art or thought, utility or morality; therefore the isolated individual, torn from the reality that constitutes him and that he constitutes, is something abstract and absurd. But he is no longer absurd, when understood in another way, with polemical intention against a false concept; as an individual not absolutely, but relatively isolated, in respect to certain contingent conditions which had wrongly been held essential: in which case the concept of society is conversely itself abstract and unreal. "Society," indeed, is also used to mean a multiplicity of beings of the same species, and it is evident that here an arbitrary element enters into the problem, for the naturalistic concept of sameness of species is arbitrary and approximative; hence the pretended sameness might fail and the society yet exist all the same. A man may not be able to find those who resemble him among a multitude of men and conduct himself as if they did not exist; but this does not prevent his living in the society of beings that are called natural, with his dog, his horse, with plants, with the earth, with the dead and with God. When he is placed in solitude or isolated from theother beings, said to belong to the same species as himself, that other society, or the communion with what remains to him of reality, will always continue, thus enabling him to continue his life of contemplation, of thought, of action and of morality. In order to understand the Spirit in its universality, we must separate it from contingencies, and society in the empirical sense is contingency, which the concept of the isolated individual (isolated from it and not from reality, from thesocietas hominum,not from thesocietas entium), enables us to surpass. The great services which this concept has rendered to Logic, to Æsthetic and especially to Economy, are known, for the latter only began to develop the philosophical spirit in itself, when it conceived economic facts as they take place in the individual, prior to what is called society, thus positing the concept of an isolated economy. Conversely, Economic, Æsthetic, Ethic and all philosophical problems and sciences lost their true nature and became bastardized, when grosssociologismreplaced among social contingencies those universals, which philosophers had with great labour removed from them and thought in their purity. Defining laws, then, as facts that occur, not only in society, but also in theisolated individual, our intention is simply to concentrate attention upon the concept oftrue society,which isall reality,and not allow it to be diverted and confused with accidental determinations, of the kind that may and may not be.

Laws as individual product: programmes of individual life.

No great art is required to find instances of individuals who make laws for themselves, carry them out and change them, grant rewards to themselves and inflict upon themselves punishments; nor is there any need to incommode the worthy Robinson of the economists to this end. Without being obliged to make the effort of imagining ourselves cast upon a desert island and provided only with a sack of corn and the Bible, it suffices to have eyes and to observe our daily life, for numbers of examples of internal legislation to present themselves. Those laws, made for our use and consumption, are calledprogrammes of life.Who can live without programmes? Who does not decide that he will desire certain actions and avoid certain others? From youth onward we begin to legislate in this way and this production of internal laws is interrupted only by death. We say, for instance:—"I shall devote my life to agriculture: I shall live in the country every year from June to November; from Decemberto February I shall come to town, that I may not lose touch with political or social life; from March to May I shall travel, for pleasure and instruction." This programme is subdivided and completed with other programmes, according to the various conditions and possibilities taken into consideration; and laws are established as to the way one should conduct oneself in respect to religion, family, friends, the State, the Church and also in respect to this or that individual; for (as is observed by Logic) the individual conceived as a fixed being, also becomes a concept, abstraction, group, series, or class. He who wished it, would be able to establish a parallel between programmes or individual laws and laws that are called social: in the individual would be found fundamental statutes, laws, rules, ordinances, temporary arrangements, contracts, single laws and all the other legal forms found in societies. Now in what conceivable way do the programmes of the individual differ from those of society? Are not those lawsprogrammes,and are not those programmeslaws?

Exclusion of the character of compulsion and critique of this concept.

To this interrogation of ours, which does not express a doubt within us, but states what seems to be an undeniable fact, defying any sort of contradiction, may be objected (and it is acommon objection) that there is a great difference between individual laws and those of society or of the State: these are compulsory, those are not; and for this reason these are true laws, while the others are mere programmes. But we cannot attach any importance to this objection, at least as thus formulated; because, having now traversed the whole of the Philosophy of the practical, general, and special, we have never met with what is called compulsion in the circle of willing and doing, save in the negative sense of deficiency of will and action. No action can ever be compulsory; every action is free, because the Spirit is freedom; there may not be action in a certain case, but a compulsory action is inconceivable, since it is a question of terms that exclude one another. Does the fact give the lie to our assertion? Let us examine the fact for a little, face to face and without preconceptions. Let us for this purpose take an extreme case: for instance, that of the law of a most powerful despot, who, being in command of police, should order a group of men to bring their first-born to sacrifice to the god in whom he believes, but they do not. Are the men who hear this manifestation of will constrained by it? What menace can make him who wishes to say no, say yes?That group of men will rebel, will take up arms, will rout the troops of the despot, will put him to death, or render him incapable of harming; and in this hypothesis the law will not reveal any character, of compulsion. But in the other hypothesis also, where they do not rebel and in the meantime bow to the will of the despot, either that they may not risk their own lives, or because they defer their rebellion to a more propitious moment and consign their sons to death; they will not have suffered any compulsion, but will have freely willed: they will have willed to preserve their own lives at the expense of their sons'; or to sacrifice some of them in order to have the time to put themselves into such a position that they may be able to rebel with the hope of victory. Thus we find in social laws, now observance, now inobservance of the law; but both occur in freedom. Inobservance may be followed by what is called punishment (that is to say, the legislator who has imposed a given class of actions, will adopt certain definite measures against those who do not obey them; to wit: he will will another class of actions, destined to render possible the first, because the punishment is a new condition of things set before the individual,according to which he must alter his previous mode of action); but the punishment always finds itself face to face with the freedom of the individual. He will be able freely to observe the law in order to avoid the punishment or its recurrence; but he will also be able freely to rebel against it, as in the instance adduced.

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