Chapter VII: Historical Annotations

The concepts of the useful and of the moral and the various attempts either to absorb the one in the other or to distinguish them, while recognizing their relations, are the problem on which has laboured the Philosophy of the practical as Ethic and Economic. Has this problem ever been fully solved? It will be permissible to doubt it, when we observe that a philosophical concept of the useful has been wanting until our own days; and that in consequence one of morality must also, strictly speaking, have been wanting, for it could not have been understood in its fulness and purity, owing to the obscure position of the term with which it is united.

[Sidenote: _Greek Ethic and its ingenuousness._]

I. The utilitarian character of Greek Ethic has been affirmed on several occasions; but one experiences a certain repugnance in applying so precise a term to the documents of ancient thought that remain to us. Socrates, it is true, posited the useful as the supreme concept of morality, and identified the good life with eudæmonia; but for him that useful was nevertheless distinct from the merely pleasing, since it consisted in what is useful to man as man, and his eudæmonia bore much resemblance to the tranquil conscience of him who fulfils his proper duties. Plato (for example, in the _Protagoras_) expounds the doctrine that good things are nothing but pleasant things, and bad things painful; but this doctrine is enunciated in order to place in relief the thesis that man does not do wrong, save through ignorance, and because the bad seems to him to be the good; without saying that in other dialogues the distinction between pleasure and the good is recognized. Nor can the most systematic of the ancient philosophers, Aristotle, be called without reserve a hedonist, a eudæmonist, or a utilitarian, on the strength of his doctrine of happiness. Happiness is the supreme good, it is an end for itself; but virtue is already included for Aristotle in happiness, virtue which is found there, not as an adjunct, but intrinsic, for which exterior goods are indeed necessary, but only as instruments. The virtuous man must be a lover of himself (φίλαυτος), that is to say, just, temperate, liberal of his possessions, ready to yield honours and offices to his friends; lover of himself, then, in the lofty signification of the word (lover, not of the empirical, but of the metempirical ego), as opposed to the wicked man, who is his own enemy. Even Epicurus could not be included among the hedonists, since for him pleasure is not an end, but a means for _calm,_ which is the true good, and calm is tranquillity of the spirit, which only the virtuous man can enjoy.

It is therefore more exact to consider Greek Ethic in its general character, not as eudæmonistic and utilitarian, but here also, in relation to the new problem that we now have before us (in the same way as was done above, in respect to practical intellectualism), as _ingenuous_; for in truth that problem did not constitute the centre of inquiries and discussions, as they present themselves in our times, nor were the different schools divided upon it. They were distinguished from one another (as has been already noted in respect to the doctrine of the passions), rather by the different rules of life respectively laid down by each as preferable. The antitheses of the Cynics and Cyrenaïcs, of the Epicureans and the Stoics, have but a superficial resemblance to those of the ethical rigorists or abstractionists, hedonists or utilitarians, which have appeared as the result of the antithesis between pleasure and pain explicitly stated in modern times. It would be difficult to point out ethical rigorists and utilitarians among thinkers truly and properly so called. In order to discover the utilitaristic attitude at that period of history, it would be necessary to have recourse to some rhetorician, such as Carneades, ready to maintain indifferently the most opposed paradoxes, or to Callicles and Thrasymachus, so magnificently portrayed in the Platonic dialogues. These were rather men of the world than philosophers, giving the immediate and violent impression of the struggle for life, and for this reason they were at conflict with Socrates, the philosopher, whom they sometimes treated as a clown and utterer of paradoxes, sometimes pitied as a child, a "suckling" child, and objected to him that philosophers do not understand one iota about politics (as often has been and often will be objected by politicians, not altogether without reason). If it be wished, all the same, to find a reference to later utilitarianism among the sophists, the hedonists and the Epicureans, or among the Stoics, with their conception of life as a war against the passions, something of future rigorism and asceticism, or in certain discussions among the Platonic dialogues as to the relation between pleasure and pain, a first trace of the discussions upon the same argument that have become most complicated in modern times, by all means let this be done, provided it be never forgotten that it is an affair of glimmers, rather than of vivid light, of antitheses hardly accentuated, not of those that are well defined and stand out clearly.

[Sidenote: _Importance of Christianity for Ethic._]

II. The precise and it may be said violent affirmation of the antithesis, was the work of Christianity, which, conceiving pleasure and duty, nature and morality to be heterogeneous elements, did great service, both to the progress of civilization in general and in particular to Ethic. It is necessary to insist upon this, for the modern world was bound afterwards to react against this antithesis, and necessarily to assume an Antichristian, even a pagan attitude, and modern art and poetry are often inspired with an abhorrence of the tenebrous Middle Ages and of sad Christianity, and give a sigh of regret for Greece as for a lost Paradise, or a shout of jubilation as for a Paradise regained. But reactions are reactions and poetry is poetry: humanity never retraces its footsteps, though it is often wont to adorn the future with memories of the past. The Greece of our hearts is a new Greece, profoundly modified by Christianity; the Greece of Goethe and of Hegel is no longer the Greece of Sophocles and of Aristotle, but a Greece far richer and more intense. Thought, like life, never turns back, and if it be necessary eventually to attain to a theoretic conciliation between pleasure and duty, between the useful and morality, such a conciliation will be very different from that of still ingenuous Greek Ethic.

[Sidenote: _The three resulting directions: utilitarianism, rigorism, and psychologism._]

The spectacle afforded by modern Ethic, from the Renaissance to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and also (with few exceptions) in the later periods is still altogether dominated by that antithesis, and therefore two currents are to be discerned in it: one that attaches itself to the first term of the antithesis, the useful, and denies the second, or resolves it in the first, the other, which denies the useful and retains moral duty as the exclusive form of the practical activity. This latter is _rigoristic_ Ethic, child of Christianity and of ascetic oriental sources, which flowed into it together by direct filiation; the other is _utilitarianism,_ child also, though illegitimate, of the distinction or rending asunder of the ancient unity of duty and pleasure, virtue and happiness, effected by Christianity. The antithesis sometimes seems to be solved and a Philosophy of the practical appears, which, without clinging exclusively to one term or the other, receives both into itself. But this philosophy, when it does not reveal itself at bottom (which generally happens), as masked utilitarianism, or (a less frequent case) rigorism attenuated in expression, has the defect of being, not philosophy, but an empirical description of the so-called principles of the practical, placed one beside the other, without a profound definition or deduction of either. This third direction may be called _intuitionism_ or _psychologism._

[Sidenote: _Hobbes, Spinoza._]

Utilitarianism is principally represented by English thought, to which belongs Hobbes, the greatest of all utilitarians, who proclaimed, _in statu naturae_ (that is to say, in genuine reality) _mensuram juris esse utilitatem._[1] Similar doctrines are to be found in Spinoza, who has also been looked upon and criticized as a pure utilitarian. But the matter is rather more complicated as regards Spinoza. Of him it should rather be said that he would have been the most resolute of ethical rigorists, had he ever been able to construct an Ethic. His determinism was an insuperable obstacle to this, for it does not admit distinctions of values, but considers the good. like being, in its abstractness, and therefore, the being of each one as _suum essere conservare_; hence the appearance of utilitarianism, assumed by the Ethic of Spinoza.

[Sidenote: _English Ethic._]

From Hobbes descend Locke, Hartley, Hume, Adam Smith, Warburton, Paley, and others such; they are all less courageous and less coherent philosophers than he. Indeed, if Hobbes himself could not but be incoherent and could not avoid causing a desire for and therefore a state of peace to arise from a state of nature or of war, whence is discovered to the mind a source of the practical, altogether different from that of the useful alone, which was presupposed; with the mean and sophistical efforts of his successors, the incoherence becomes altogether irritating. The aid sought from associationism is among these efforts, and the excogitation of the example of the miser (found for the first time in 1731, in a discourse of the Rev. John Gay),[2] and also the admission of the principle of sympathy beside that of egoism, a principle which with a cast of the dice is made to disappear again, and to become absorbed in egoism itself. The inanity of utilitarianism, which has already in Hobbes a tendency to disavow itself, by recognizing as true laws not those of nature, but those revealed by God (_in Scripturis sacris latae_),[3] and in Locke retained the divine side by side with the civil laws and those of public opinion,[4] became evident in the theological utilitarianism of Warburton and of Paley. As for intuitionists and psychologists, such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, these either left an unsolved dualism (as was above all the case with the last), or, although possessing the most lively consciousness of moral force, they yet strove to deduce it in some way from the egoistical and utilitarian principle. The French materialists of the eighteenth century, such as Helvétius and D'Holbach, though less subtle, are more consequent.

[Sidenote: _Idealistic Philosophy._]

Rigoristic Ethic displayed its strength against anti-ethical utilitarianism and anti-philosophical psychologism, not only in traditional scholastic, but also in the explicit polemic undertaken by Cudworth, Cumberland, Clarke and Price, against Hobbes, Locke, and the other utilitarians who followed them. The makers of great systems, too, attached themselves to ethical rigorism, Descartes (and in a certain sense Spinoza), Malebranche, Leibnitz, and the philosophy of the school of Leibnitz, as the moral consciousness declared itself in its true nature in Jean Jacques Rousseau against the French materialists. But rigorism also ended by contradicting itself in the same way as utilitarianism, owing to its one-sidedness, when it recognized a principle that was not merely utilitarian or that lost itself in mystery, either by reasoning with the utilitarian principle in the course of its development, or by receiving utilitarianism into itself, without any mediation, in the form of the morally indifferent. This is an old evil, which had already appeared in the _ἀδιάφορα_ of Stoicism, and in all those exceptions to the rigorous moral law, which ascetic Christianity had been obliged to allow, in order to exist side by side with the worldly life.

[Sidenote: _Kant and his affirmation of the ethical principle._]

III. The strength and the weakness of rigorism are to be clearly seen in the greatest ethical system to which it led: the moral doctrine of Emmanuel Kant. It was time that the principle of Christian Ethic should be reaffirmed, duty as clearly distinguished from pleasure, giving to it that relief which it had been without in the systems of Descartes and of Leibnitz, after the materialistic and utilitarian orgy that had lasted for more than a century, and after the equivocal attempts at an approach and fusion of the useful and the moral. Kant did not indeed in this respect oppose Wolffian Leibnitzianism; and although the ethical concept of _perfectio_ seemed to him to be empty and indeterminate, yet he was never able to prove that it was a eudæmonistic and utilitarian concept.[5] But that concept certainly had not the energy of duty and of the Kantian categoric imperative, which are true declarations of war against every heteronomous morality. This is the merit of Kant, after whom no serious philosopher can be anything but a Kantian in Ethic, as, after Christianity, to no one, not a wind-bag or an extravagant, is it given to be anything but a Christian. Moral action has no other motive than morality itself: to promote one's own happiness (said Kant) can never be _immediately_ duty, and even less the principle of all duties.

[Sidenote: _Self-contradictions of Kant concerning the concept of the useful, of prudence, of happiness, etc._]

But the mistake of Kant lies in not having well analyzed the concepts of pleasure, of happiness and of the useful, and in having thought that he could free himself from them, by placing them among another set of principles, which he called _hypothetical_ imperatives and opposed to the _categoric. _ We know that the imperative of those concepts is not less categoric than that of morality: it is a true imperative, not to be confounded with the knowledge of experience, metaphorically called imperative, because it assumes the appearance of a technique dealing with the practical. Kant was to some extent aware of this, for he sub-distinguishes the hypothetical imperatives into _problematical_ and _assertorial._ The first of these are technical and give rise to maxims of _cleverness_ (_Geschicklichkeit_); the second are _pragmatic_ and consist of maxims of _prudence._ Observe the difficulties in which he becomes involved, through not wishing to recognize the autonomous character of these imperatives compared with the moral imperatives, that is to say, the categoricity of both. The imperatives of prudence and of happiness are concerned (he says) "with an end which can be assumed as real among all rational beings (in so far as the imperatives can be applied to them in their quality of dependent beings); and, therefore, an intention, which not only they _may_ possess, but which it is assumed with certainty that they _do_ possess, according to a necessity of nature, which is the intention of happiness." We should therefore conclude that they are concerned with an end not less serious than that of morality. But Kant perceives the poison in the argument and strives to turn them again into imperatives concerning means: "ability" (he continues) "in the choice of the means of one's own well-being, may be called _prudence;_ therefore the imperative relating to the choice of the means for one's own happiness, namely the precept of prudence, is always hypothetical; the action is ordered, not absolutely, but only as means for another purpose." It is clear that to be able to call that knowledge or ability "prudence" is not sufficient to change the imperative of happiness into mere ability and knowledge. Kant perceives this also: "If it were easy to give a definite concept of happiness, the imperatives of prudence would altogether coincide with those of ability and would also be analytic. For it would be said in the one case as in the other, that he who wishes the end also wishes (necessarily, in conformity with reason) the only means for the purpose within his power. The concept of happiness is unfortunately so indeterminate, that although every one wishes to attain to it, he is nevertheless unable ever to say definitely and in accordance with himself exactly what he desires and wishes. The reason is that the elements which belong to the concept of happiness are all empirical and must therefore all be taken from experience; quired an absolute whole, a maximum of well-being in my present state and in every future state." In what shall happiness be placed? In riches? In knowledge? In long life? In good health? None of these things is without dangers. In short, it is impossible to determine with full certainty, according to any principle whatever, what would make man truly happy; therefore it is not possible to act according to a definite principle, but only according to empirical concepts; and the imperatives of prudence, strictly speaking, command nothing.--As we see, the only effective argument of Kant against the admission of the categoric imperatives of well-being, of utility, of happiness, is that he does not know exactly what they are. This did not authorize him to exclude those imperatives and reduce them to pseudo--imperatives, to hypothetic imperatives, or to empirical rules. In other passages of his works, Kant tends to the other solution of excluding the maxims of prudence from the pure practical reason, because they are maxims of self-love (_Selbstliebe,_) or of the practical reason empirically or _pathologically_ conditioned, since for him every pleasure that precedes the moral law and is independent of it, is pathological, that is to say, it belongs to the senses, to the inferior appetitive faculty, not to that which is superior and to reason. Kant often returns to this point and always experiences the same embarrassments and contradictions, as is proved by the variety of the arguments to which he has recourse.[6]

[Sidenote: _Errors derived from it in his Ethic._]

But the unrecognized autonomy of the useful, of happiness, of well-being, generally revenges itself; because, surreptitiously introduced, it causes itself to be unduly recognized afterwards. Thus it comes about that Kant creates, on the one hand, the monster of disinterested actions, and on the other, does not altogether exclude the concept of actions morally indifferent or permissible.[7] Thus, too, it happens that owing to the discord that he preserves between virtue and happiness, thinking vain the pretence of the Stoics and Epicureans to reconcile them in this life, he is led to postulate the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul, and to make of virtue a means of rendering oneself worthy of happiness in another life. "The cold duty of Kant" (wrote Hegel) "is the last undigested morsel given by revelation to reason, and it weighs upon its stomach."[8] Consequently, the Ethic of Kant, although so different in tendencies and inspiration, yet joined hands with theological utilitarianism, ending at length by also declaring that moral obligation is inconceivable, without the idea of a God, who rewards and punishes in another life, and by declaring that God and the immortality of the soul cannot be otherwise affirmed than by means of moral exigencies. Moral rigorism, like utilitarianism, makes shipwreck in mystery.

[Sidenote: _Occasions for a philosophy of economy._]

IV. Occasions and opportunities for a philosophical concept of the useful were not, to tell the truth, wanting to the thought anterior to Kant; but Kant let them all slip. Without attributing too much suggestive power to certain classes of virtues, such as _fortitude_ or _prudence_ (virtues that are generically economic, not exclusively moral), which had passed from the Greek into the Christian Ethic, nor to certain acute aphorisms of psychologists and moralists (for instance: _Il y a des héros en mal comme en bien;--Ce n'est pas assez d'avoir des grandes qualités, il en faut avoir l'économie;--La souveraine habilité consiste à bien connaître le prix des choses, etc.[9]),_ a first opportunity was certainly afforded by that inferior faculty of appetition, which the Wolffian philosophy had inherited from the Platonic, Aristotelian, and scholastic tradition.[10] That faculty was parallel with the inferior faculty of knowledge, which that same philosophy had with Baumgarten attempted to develop into an independent science, _Aesthetica,_ a development that should have led to the thought of an analogous transformation of the corresponding practical faculty, which might have become an _Oeconomica_ or _Ethica inferior,_ as from Æsthetic had been made a _Gnoseologia inferior._ But Kant also rejected Æsthetic, as science of a special theoretic form, science of intuition or fancy, conceiving instead, on the one hand a transcendental Æsthetic or doctrine of space and time, and on the other, a Critique of judgment, or doctrine of finality and morality, symbolized in nature;[11] thus he fell into other difficulties, when he wished to establish an analogy between the other forms of the practical reason and that of the theoretical.[12] Although he preserved the division of the faculty of appetition into inferior and superior (_untere und obere Begehrungsvermögen,_) he failed to realize, as we have seen, the true philosophical concept of the _inferior._

[Sidenote: _The problem of politics and Machiavellism._]

A second opportunity was presented by the series of treatises, which, from Machiavelli onward, had come to conceive of politics as a fact independent of morality, elaborating in particular those precepts and maxims of the "reason of state," of which we have already had occasion to expose the empirical character. But however empirical they were, those mental products gave rise to the problem of the relations between morals and politics, that is to say, as to whether the two terms could be considered as immediately identifiable. The thought of Machiavelli, in particular, constituted an enigma that all attempted to interpret in the most different ways, most by vituperating, some by defending it with strange reasons (Spinoza was among the defenders[13]), though they never succeeded in freeing themselves from its difficulties, for to that end would have been necessary the understanding of the spiritual value of the utilitarian will, even if amoral. It was only when this difficult concept was to some extent caught sight of (by De Sanctis) that Machiavelli appeared at once justified and criticized; but while that concept remained obscure, the point of view of Machiavelli was never attained and the work was condemned for reasons of a moralistic character (Villari).[14] Kant, too, in his work on _Perpetual Peace,_ treated the problem of the relations between morality and politics, affirming that no disagreement is possible between them, unless by politics is meant a _doctrine_ of prudence, that is, "a theory of maxims for the selection of the means best adapted for the objects of individual advantage; that is, when the existence of morality is not altogether denied."[15] Here too, he was right, when he claimed that concrete political actions should be submitted to morality; but, on the other hand, he did not perceive that submission and identity presuppose a previous independence and distinction.

[Sidenote: _The doctrine of the passions._]

Finally, a third opportunity was offered, in the rehabilitation of the passions, begun by the philosophers of the seventeenth century and expressed, as has been said, in a notable manner by Vico. Now if the passions in general be the volitional activity itself, considered in its dialectic, they are also the soul turned to the particular, the useful in respect to the universal, which is sought by morality. This is to be seen especially in Vico and better still in Hegel, very similar to Vico in this respect; he admirably developed this moment of _particularity,_ which is passion, necessary for the concreteness of the universal. As the passions for Vico are human nature itself, which morality directs but does not destroy, and are neither good nor bad in themselves, and _utilitates ex se neque turpes neque honestae, sed earum inaequalitas est turpitudo, aequalitas autem honestas_[16]--so, for Hegel, "passion is neither good nor bad in its formal character and only expresses the fact that a subject has placed all the living interest of his spirit, of his talent, of his character, of his enjoyment, in a single content. Nothing great can or has been accomplished without passion. Only a morality that is dead and too often hypocritical can inveigh against the form of passion as such. ... Ethicity concerns the content, which, as such, is universal, something inactive, and has its active element in the subject: the fact that the content is immanent in it constitutes interest, and in so far as it dominates all the efficient subjectivity, passion."[17]

[Sidenote: _Hegel and the concept of the useful._]

The same Hegel once observed: "As for what concerns utility, morality must not play the disdainful towards it, for every good action is actually useful, that is to say, possesses reality and produces something good. A good action that were not useful would not be an action, would not possess reality. The inutility of the good in itself, as its unreality, is its abstractness. Not only is it possible to be conscious of utility, but we ought to be conscious of it, since it is true that it is useful to know the good: utility does not mean anything but that we are conscious of our own action. If this be blameworthy, it will also be blameworthy to know the goodness of one's own action."[18]

Hegel thus discovered the function of the useful when rehabilitating the passions, though in a fugitive manner. But Kant had not attributed importance to the problem of the passions in Ethic, and had not therefore been in a position to avail himself of the suggestion contained in the doctrine of the passions.

[Sidenote: _Fichte and the elaboration of the Kantian Ethic._]

Fichte, in re-elaborating the Kantian philosophy, showed the relation between pleasure and duty in a manner that came very near to the truth. He gave precedence to what he called the _empirical_ over the moral man, the former corresponding entirely to the merely utilitarian or economic. What, asks Fichte, will be his maxim of action at this stage? "As there is no other impulse in his consciousness save the natural, and as this is directed only toward enjoyment and has pleasure for its motive, that maxim cannot but be to choose what promises the maximum of pleasure in intensity and extension; that is, the maxim of his own happiness. This may likewise be sought in the pleasure of others by means of the sympathetic impulses; but the ultimate scope of his action always remains the satisfaction of those impulses and pleasures which arise from it, and therefore, his own happiness. Man at this stage is an intelligent animal." "But," he continues, "it is a fault to remain here, and man must raise himself to a stage at which he enjoys an altogether different liberty; he must be free, not only _formaliter,_ but also _materialiter,_ that is, he must attain to the moral stage."[19] That first stage, then, is formal freedom, and is no longer considered a pathological condition of the spirit, or as that merely technical knowledge of which Kant speaks. This would constitute no small progress, if Fichte had been conscious of all the richness of the concept of which he had caught a glimpse, and had made it fructify. But it seems that he was not aware of this, and certainly he took no advantage of it whatever.

[Sidenote: _The problem of the useful and of morality in the thinkers of the nineteenth century._]

V. The inventive genius of modern Ethic is exhausted with these thinkers. Their successors have reproduced the old situations, one after the other. Some, while accepting the Kantian morality, wished to temper and correct its exaggerations, which was not possible, save by a more profound speculative vision of the relation between pleasure and good, the useful and the moral; whereas they believed that they could attain to it by _also_ taking account of pleasure and of happiness, and by conceiving a doctrine of happiness or eudæmonology side by side with Ethic, but subordinate to it (in Italy: Galluppi and Rosmini). Schiller had already recognized in Kant's time the unilaterality of Kant, and had made it the object of criticism and of epigram, which, however, does not mean that he had truly and properly corrected its errors. Others occupied themselves in various ways with the enumeration and juxtaposition of the principles: thus, for instance, Schopenhauer makes compassion arise beside egoism, which then divides into benevolence and justice; and Herbart, although he excludes the useful, because, according to him, "it refers to a point external to itself,"[20] enumerates five practical ideas that are not all truly moral. The affinity both of Herbart and of Schopenhauer, with Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and English and Scottish psychologism, is clear. The study of the practical ideas of Herbart is not without interest as an unconscious affirmation of the necessity of the economic principle. The first of these, indeed, _internal freedom,_ consists in being able to achieve with our own strength the model that we propose to ourselves, and is liberty, but not yet moral liberty. "To be able to decide _according to motives_" (says Herbart on one occasion) "is already a sign of psychical health: to decide _according to the best motives_ is the condition of morality."[21] The second of the practical ideas, that of _perfection,_ is concerned precisely with the strength of the will, taken in itself, and resembles a combination of the Hellenic virtues of fortitude and temperance. Here willing is considered in itself, independently of its objects, and in this consideration there is no other difference, save their strength, between the various Willings: the greater this is, the more it is admired; weakness displeases and strength pleases the practical judgment, and this even when it is unjust, iniquitous and wicked, and notwithstanding such vices.[22] Lotze, following Herbart, determines as requisites of actions, that they must be possible, energetic, conscientious on the one hand, and on the other, consequent, habitual, individual, stating that these two series of predicates apply equally to moral and immoral actions.[23]--He does not think it worth while to take count of the English utilitarians and post-Kantian intuitionists, or of their French, Italian, and German imitators; because, just as the appearance of a Hobbes, of a Hume, or of a Shaftesbury, is important in their time, so the appearance of a Bentham or of a Spencer out of their time is insignificant, for these latter amuse themselves with the useful, with association and evolution (which according to them should become the socially useful), and with the double principle of egoism and of altruism. Stuart Mill alone can afford some interest, when he says (with that mental inconclusiveness which has seemed to many to be acuteness and equilibrium) that moral pleasures differ from the sensual, not only in degree, but also in genus and in quality (_in kind_); and that justice is a class of socially useful actions that arouses feelings themselves also different, not only in degree, but also in genus and in quality (_in kind_), from those caused by useful actions. In short, the philosophy of the nineteenth century has not only been unable to progress, but has not even been able to maintain itself on a level with the practical doctrines of Fichte and of Hegel, in which a glimpse was caught of the relation of first and second practical degree, and there was a tendency to reconcile passion and ethicity.

[Sidenote: _Extrinsic union of Ethic and of economic Science, from antiquity to the nineteenth century._]

VI. Certainly economic science, owing to its empirico-quantitative character, already noted, was not made to fill the void and to furnish a more positive and exact concept of the useful. The contact between Economy and Philosophy remained for a time extrinsic, since economic Science appeared in treatises upon the Philosophy of the practical, together with the other juridical and historical matter, which it was customary to include with it. The precedent for such a union could be found even in Aristotle's _Nichomachean Ethic,_ which supplies certain notions as to the concept of price and value. Considerations on the same argument abound in the Scholastics, especially in St. Thomas, whose _Oeconomica_ always forms part of his Ethic, as the doctrine for the government of the family. Finally, there is an ample discussion of the subject in the treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which took the name of _natural Rights._ It happened that the English moralists of the eighteenth century were also led to occupy themselves with Economy and the economists with Ethic, owing to the juxtaposition of the two concepts for didascalic reasons and for University convenience. Thus Hutcheson developed Economy, in his _Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy_ (1747); and the _Essays_ of Hume are occupied with moral and economic questions; and Adam Smith is the author, not only of _The Wealth of Nations,_ but also of _The Theory of the Moral Feelings,_ almost two parts of a Philosophy of the practical. The importance of economic studies had become so palpable at that time, that toward the end of the century, Buhle was led to include them in the history of philosophy (and we believe that he was the first). He exposes at length in his work the ideas of Hume, of Smith, of Stewart, attributing it as a merit to the English writers to have reduced that material to philosophy by a method of treatment without example (he said) in previous centuries.[24] Finally, Hegel dedicated certain important paragraphs of his _Philosophy of Law,_ in the section dealing with civil society,[25] to the "system of wants," or Economy. The cult of Economy has rather increased than diminished in the nineteenth century and the much-discussed social problem (especially capitalism and socialism) has not been without a certain influence upon treatises of Ethic, where, if we rarely find statements that are strictly economic, there is always plenty of chatter about property and production and the relations between the working and capitalistic class.

[Sidenote: _Philosophical questions arising from a more intimate contact between the two._]

But a more intimate bond could not take place, save when attempts to understand the material of science and to place it in the system of the spirit were united with economic Science, properly so called. For since that science is occupied with human actions and appears to give advice as to conduct, in what relation can it possibly stand to Ethic, which is also occupied with actions and also gives advice?--Such a question was in a certain way already implied in the mediæval idea of a _justum pretium,_ to be placed beside the effective price, which is realized according to the knowledge and convenience of each; it forms the kernel of the debate between the _subjective and the objective_ concept of value, that is, between the purely economic consideration and another resulting from moral exigencies, between the value that is, and that which in a certain way should be. It began to wax ardent, with the accusation, of being theoreticians of egoism, hurled at the great English economists, Smith and Ricardo; this accusation, taken up and modified by others, became accepted as the true and proper designation of the function of Economy, which should accordingly be that of studying human actions in their exclusively abstract, egoistic aspect. But, since abstraction is not full reality, the false task assigned to Economy called for the aid of the doctors. Such were the French economists, seized with the mania of teaching generosity to the cold Britons (Blanqui, etc.); such too were the Germans, who wished to induce Economy to mend its ways and to become conscious of its lofty duties towards the human race (Knies); such, finally, were the Christians and Catholics, who thought to purify or to exorcise that worldly and diabolical science by mingling with it ethical and economical considerations. It was rarely suspected that economic facts, as such, are neither egoistic nor altruistic, neither moral nor immoral; and when it was desired to philosophize the subject, some one got out of the difficulty by enumerating five groups of human actions, four egoistic and only one moral: the search for the satisfaction of one's own conscience, with the fear of blame attached (Wagner). The problem, especially in Austria, passed from the hands of the mathematicians into those of the psychologists. These have undertaken to seek out the resemblance and the difference between economic and ethical values. But on the psychological ground (as we have already remarked when discussing intuitionistic solutions), far from solving the antithesis, philosophy is dissolved. The mathematicians on the other hand, that is to say the economists, who employ the quantitative method, fascinated with the evidence of this procedure and failing to realize that it is empty evidence, instead of limiting themselves to the construction of their most useful formulæ, increase the confusion by beginning to philosophize in the strangest manner; as is to be observed in the case of Pareto, one of the most acute and learned of contemporary economists. In one of his recent writings he exposes the method of economic science with a string of propositions such as these: "_Il faut faire une opération de séparation.... Cette première opération accomplie, ... il est nécessaire de substituer par abstraction, des conceptions simples, au moins relativement, aux objets réels extrêmement complexes.... Mais la science n'est réellement liée à une abstraction plutôt qu'à une autre.... Pour peu qu'on y trouve un avantage.... Cela ne suffit pas encore: il faut continuer à séparer et à abstraire...._"

And after having thus advised us to treat facts without pity, mutilating them, grinding them down, substituting for them names or abstractions, Pareto continues undisturbed, as though all this were nothing: these theories, "_telles, au moins que nous les concevons, se séparant des anciens en ce qu'elles s'attachent aux faits et non aux mots_"![26] If such be the facts, what will be the words?

[Sidenote: _The theories of the hedonistic calculus: from Maupertuis to Hartmann._]

VII. It is all the more necessary to understand the diversity between economic Science and the Philosophy of economy, between the quantitative and the qualitative processes, owing to the fact that since economic studies first flourished, in the eighteenth century, absurd ideas were introduced into the books of philosophers, as to the calculus of pleasures and the balance of life. Maupertuis' book, _Essai de philosophie morale_ (1749), had a great influence in this direction. Here, a balance is presented, showing a deficit on the side of pleasures; and, following this lead, many Italian philosopher-economists of the same period occupied themselves with such calculations and balances (Ortes, Verri, Briganti, etc.), arriving at results, now optimistic, now pessimistic.[27] Galluppi, too, accepted the method as a good one,[28] and it is no marvel that the poet Leopardi made it his, steeped as he was in the sensualistic philosophy of the preceding century. But not only are the trivial optimistic sophisms of the utilitarians founded upon it, but likewise many of the pessimistic arguments of Schopenhauer and especially of Hartmann, the latter quite unconscious (being in other respects closely connected with the German idealist tradition) that he was accepting an element of an altogether anti-idealistic, that is, of a mechanistic origin.

For all these reasons, it is important to oppose the concept of the useful (which is not indeed a concept, but an abstraction), given by economic Science, with its philosophic concept. This we have attempted to do in the preceding theory of Economy, as at once distinct from and united with Ethic. In that theory, we have especially striven to collect stray threads of aphorisms and observations of good sense as to the value of the will, even when amoral; as to the doctrines of happiness and of pleasure, of the inferior appetitive faculty, of others dealing with politics and the arts of prudence, of the new conception of the passions, considered as the spirit in its individuality;--we have striven to attach to these that which is as it were the philosophical result drawn from economic Science, that is to say, the idea of a form of value that would be neither the intellectual, the æsthetic, nor the ethical, and cannot by any means be resolved into an ethical anti-value or egoism;--and finally, we have attempted to unite all these threads into one, in order to form the bond that ethical rigorism has hitherto been unable to place between itself and reality, between the universal and the practical individual, at the same time justifying utilitarian, activity in its autonomy. We believe that this historical sketch will have contributed to make clear the necessity of our attempt.

[1] _De cive,_ c. i. § 10.

[2] E. Albee, _A History of English Utilitarianism,_ London, 1902, pp. 26-27.

[3] _De cive,_ c. iii. § 33.

[4] _Essay on Human Understanding,_ Book II. c. 28, § 7 _sqq._

[5] _Gründl. d. Metaphys. d. Sitten,_ p. 70.

[6] _Gründl,_ p. 36 _sq.; Kr. d. prakt. Vernft._ pp. 15, 21-28, 43, 145; cf. _Metaph. d. Sitt._ pp. 208-209.

[7] _Metaph. d. Sitt._ pp. 22, 23, 246.

[8] _Gesch. d. Phil._ iii. p. 535.

[9] La Rochefoucauld, _Maximes_ (ed. Gamier), nn. 159, 185, 224.

[10] Wolf, _Psych, emp.,_ Frankfort and Leipzig, 1738, §§ 584, 880.

[11] Croce, _Estetica,_ pp. 324-328.

[12] _Kr. d. prakt. Vern._ pp. 79, 108.

[13] _Tract. theol._ c. iv. § 7.

[14] Cf. Croce, in De Sanctis, _Scritti vari_ (Napoli, 1898), i. pp. xiv-xvi, pref.

[15] _Zum ewigen Friede,_ in _Werke_ (ed. Rosenkranz-Schubert), vol. vii. pt. i. p. 370.

[16] _De uno univ. juris principio,_ § 46.

[17] _Encykl._ § 474, and cf. other passages: _Phän. d. Geistes,_ pp. 484-486; _Encykl._ § 474; _Phil. d. Rechtes,_ § 124; _Phil. d. Gesch._ pp. 39-41.

[18] _Gesch. d. Phil._ ii. pp. 405-6.

[19] _System der Sittenlehre,_ p. 180 _sq._; cf. p. 15.

[20] _Einleitung,_ § 82 (Italian transl. p. 102).

[21] _Op. cit._ § 128 (It. tr. p. 172).

[22] _Allg. prakt. Phil._ p. 35.

[23] _Grundzüge der Ethik,_ §§ 12, 14.

[24] _Gesch. d. neueren Philos._ (1796-1804), sect. iv. cap. 18 (Fr. tr., Paris, 1816, v. 432-753)

[25] _Phil. d. Rechts,_ § 189 _sqq._

[26] "L'Économie et la sociologie au point de vue scientifique" in _Rivistetele Scienza,_ i. (1907) 293, 312.

[27] See M. Losacco, _Le dottrine edonistiche italiane del secolo XVIII_ (Napoli, 1902).

[28] Galluppi, _Elementi di filosofia_ (Napoli, 1846), ii. 265-266, 406 _sqq._

SECOND SECTION

THE ETHICAL PRINCIPLE