Chapter VII: Historical Notes 273

I. The problem of freedom--II. The doctrine of evil--III. Will and freedom--Conscience and responsibility--IV. The concept of duty--Repentance and remorse--The doctrine of the passions--Virtues and vices--V. The doctrine of individuality: Schleiermacher--Romantic theories and most modern theories--VI. The concept of development and progress.

THIRD SECTION

UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL

Double result: precedence of the theoretical over the practical, and of the practical over the theoretical--Errors of those who maintain the exclusive precedence of the one or the other--Problem of the unity of this duality--Not a duality of opposites--Not a duality of finite and infinite--Perfect analogy of the two forms: theoretic and practical--Not a parallelism, but a circle--The circle of Reality: thought and being, subject and object--Critique of the theories as to the primacy of the theoretical or of the practical reason--New pragmatism: Life conditioning Philosophy--Deductive confirmation of the two forms, and deductive exclusion of the third (feeling).

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 309

The utilitarian or economic form, and the moral or ethical form--Insufficiency of the descriptive and psychological distinction--Deduction and necessity of integrating it with induction--The two forms as a fact of consciousness--The economic form--The ethical form--Impossibility of eliminating them--Confirmations in fact.

II

CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ETHICAL FORM 323

Exclusion of materialistic and intellectualistic criticisms--The two possible negations--The thesis of utilitarianism against the existence of moral acts--Difficulty arising from the presence of these--Attempt to explain them as quantitative distinctions--Criticism of it--Attempt to explain them as facts, either extraneous to the practical or irrational, and stupid--Associationism and evolutionism. Critique--Desperate attempt: theological utilitarianism and mystery.

III

CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ECONOMIC FORM 337

The thesis of moral abstractionism against the concept of the useful--The useful as means, or as theoretic fact--Technical and hypothetical imperatives--Critique: the useful is a practical fact --The useful as the egoistic or the immoral--Critique: the useful is amoral--The useful as ethical minimum--Critique: the useful is premoral--Desperate attempt: the useful as inferior practical conscience--Confirmation of the autonomy of the useful.

IV

RELATION BETWEEN ECONOMIC AND ETHICAL FORMS 348

Economic and ethic as double degree of the practical--Errors arising from conceiving them as co-ordinated--Disinterested actions: critique--Vain polemic conducted with such Supposition against utilitarianism--Actions morally indifferent, obligatory, supererogatory, etc. Critique--Comparison with the relation between art and philosophy--Other erroneous conceptions of modes of action--Pleasure and economic activity, happiness and virtue--Pleasure and pain and feeling--Coincidence of duty with pleasure--Critique of rigorism or asceticism--Relation of happiness and virtue--Critique of the subordination of pleasure to morality--No empire of morality over the forms of the spirit--Non-existence of other practical forms; and impossibility of subdivision of the two established.

V

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMY AND THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF ECONOMY 364

Problem of the relations between Philosophy and Science of economy --Unreality of the laws and concepts of economic Science--Economic Science founded on empirical concepts but not empirical or descriptive--Absoluteness of its laws--Their mathematical nature--Its principles and their character of arbitrary postulates and definitions--Its utility--Comparison of Economy with Mechanic, and reason for its exclusion from ethical, æsthetic, and logical facts--Errors of philosophism and historicism in Economy--The two degenerations: extreme abstractism and empiristical disaggregation--Glance at the history of the various directions of Economy--Meaning of the judgment of Hegel as to economic Science.

VI

CRITIQUE OF THE CONFUSIONS BETWEEN ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMY 382

Adoption of the economic method and formulæ on the part of Philosophy--Errors that derive from it--1st, Negation of philosophy for economy--2nd, Universal value attributed to empirical concepts. Example: free trade and protectionism--3rd, Transformation of the functions of calculation into reality--The pretended calculus of pleasures and pains; and doctrines of optimism and pessimism.