Chapter V: Judicial Activity as Generically Practical Activity (economic) 526

Legislative activity as generically practical--Vanity of disputes as to the character of institutions, whether economic or ethical: punishment, marriage, State, etc.--Legislative activity as economic--Judicial activity: its economic character: its consequent identity with economic activity--Non-recognition of economic form, and meaning of the problem as to distinction between morality and rights--Theories of co-action and of exteriority, as distinctive characteristics: critique of them--Moralistic theories of rights: critique--Duality of positive and ideal rights, historical and natural rights, etc.; absurd attempts at unification and co-ordination--Value of all these attempts as confused glimpse of amoral character of rights--Confirmations of this character in ingenuous conscience--Comparison between rights and language. Grammar and codes--Logic and language; morality and rights--History of language as literary and artistic history--History of rights as political and social history.

VI

HISTORICAL NOTES 543

I. Distinction between morality and rights, and its importance for the history of the economic principle--Indistinction lasting till Tomasio--II. Tomasio and followers--Kant and Fichte--Hegel--Herbart and Schopenhauer--Rosmini and others--III. Stahl, Ahrens, Trendelenburg--Utilitarians--IV. Recent writers of treatises--Strident contradictions. Stammler--V. Value of law--In antiquity--Diderot--Romanticism--Jacobi--Hegel--Recent doctrines--VI. Natural rights and their dissolution--Historical school of rights--Comparison between rights and language--VII. Concept of law, and studies of comparative rights and of the general Doctrine of law--VIII. Legalism and moral casuistic--Probabilitism and Jesuitic morality--Critique of the concept of the licit--Fichte--Schleiermacher--Rosmini.

CONCLUSION 586

The Philosophy of the Spirit as the whole of Philosophy--Correspondence between Logic and System--Dissatisfaction at the end of every system and its irrational motive--Rational motive: inexhaustibility of Life and of Philosophy.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

This translation of Benedetto Croce's _Philosophy of the Practical_ (Economic and Ethic) is complete.

FIRST PART

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN GENERAL

FIRST SECTION

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS RELATIONS