Economics and ethics are the double grade of the practical activity: it is possible to conceive of actions having no moral value, and yet economically effective, but not of moral actions which should not at the same time be useful, or economic. Morality lives concretely in utility, as the universal in the individual, the eternal in the contingent. But we can never sufficiently emphasize the true character of the distinction, which, taken as a purely abstract and psychological one, might justify the persistence of morally indifferent actions within the moral consciousness. The moral consciousness, once it is awakened, invests the whole life of the practical mind, as the logical consciousness does for the theoretical mind, and it abolishes that condition of innocence, in which the purely economic is not yet subject to the moral judgment, in the same way as perception and reflection destroy our naïve belief in the reality of purely poetical imaginations. On the other hand, there are no actions which are economically ally indifferent, or, as they are generally called, disinterested; morality requires that the individual should transform a universal interest into his individual one, make of morality itself his personal utility, but it cannot ask for the abolition of all interests, which would mean the abolition of morality as well. The value of a moral action is in direct proportion with the passion and fervour with which we identify our individual ends with ends transcending our empirical individuality. In the light of this distinction, the old oppositions of pleasure and duty, of happiness and virtue, lose a good deal of their rigour and sharpness. Pleasure as the positive economic activity or feeling can never be in real contrast with duty as the positive moral activity: a moral action brings with itself its own satisfaction or pleasure, and if it brings pain also, either the good action was not entirely good, not willed with all our heart, or it was accompanied by a new practical problem, which has yet to be solved. Similarly, happiness is not necessarily virtue, but there is no virtue which is not happiness; the sorrows of the virtuous are not intrinsic to morality, being but the limits of human activity, which the good share with the wicked. We all can transform our limits into sorrows, by our restlessness and unreasonableness; or, through resignation, our sorrows in limits and conditions of activity. Asceticism, which regards pleasure and happiness as essentially immoral, is the extreme form of moral abstractism; by destroying the economic category, it deprives morality of its reality and concreteness. It is, in fact, in the practical sphere, the counterpart of mysticism in the theoretical, which makes thought impossible by dissociating it from expression.