The preceding chapter deals with the practical activity in general, with the general concept of will or action. We must now introduce in that concept a distinction analogous to that by which the theoretical activity has appeared to us first as the knowledge of die individual or intuition, then as the knowledge of the universal or concept. But here, again, we shall not employ the merely descriptive and psychological method, nor yet attempt to deduce this distinction from the analogy between the theoretical and the practical activity; we shall appeal once more to the immediate test of consciousness, which in fact reveals two distinct forms of the will, the economic and the ethic. Economic activity is the one that wills and realizes only that which relates to the conditions of fact in which the individual finds himself; ethical activity, the one that wills and realizes that which, though related to those conditions, at the same time in some way transcends them. To one correspond individual, to the other, universal ends; on one is based the judgment on the coherence of the action in itself, on its adequacy to its individual end; on the other, the judgment on its adequacy to universal ends, which transcend the individual. If we recognise only the ethical form, we perceive very soon that it implies the other one, which we intended to exclude, since our action, though universal in its meaning, must always be something concrete and individually determined. We do not realize morality in the universal, but always a given moral volition, not the abstract virtues, but the concrete works. Although a moral action is not only our individual pleasure, yet it must be that, too, or we should never be able to realize it. On the other hand, the mere economic action, the satisfaction of our immediate pleasure, though it satisfies us in relation to our individual end, yet it leaves constantly unsatisfied that which we are beside and beyond our individual determinations, our deepest and truest being. And this dissatisfaction will last until we succeed in lifting ourselves above the infinite succession of individual ends, and in inserting in them a universal value. This passage or conversion from the purely economic to the ethic, from pleasure to duty, is designed by Croce as the conquest of that peace which is not of a fabulous future, but of the present and real; in every instant is eternity, to him who knows how to reach it. Our actions will be always new, because always new problems are put before us by the course of reality; but in them, if we accomplish them with a pure heart, seeking in them what lifts them above themselves, we shall each time possess the Whole. Such is the character of the moral action; which satisfies us not as individuals but as men, and as individuals only because the individual is a man, and as men only through the medium of individual satisfaction.