A law, being a volition of a class of actions, and therefore of an abstraction, is in itself an abstract or unreal volition. What we actually will is not the law, but the single, individual action under the law: the reality of the law is only in its execution. In the individual execution, however, what realizes itself is not the law, but the practical principle, economic or ethic, of which both the observance and the non-observance of the law are particular determinations; the individual practical problems can never be foreseen seen by the law, which is by its nature general and abstract. What is then, it may be asked, the use of the laws? Croce's answer is that the laws are helps to the real volition, in the same way as the empirical and abstract concepts, though not real knowledge themselves, are helps to knowledge. In order to determine ourselves to the single action, it is useful to begin by fixing our attention to the class of which that single is an element; in order to know either the individual, or the universal, it is useful to create, between the universal and the individual, classes and types, general concepts, or, as Croce calls them, relatively constant variables, through which the process of actual knowledge is made easier and quicker. We cannot think the pseudo-concepts, but they help us to think; we cannot will the laws, but they help us to will. The concept of law is akin to that of plan or design; in practice, a plan or design, and its execution, are one and the same thing, as we act by constantly changing our design, because reality, which is the foundation of our action, is in perpetual change. But this unreality of the plan, as distinct from the concrete individual action, does not deprive the plan itself of its practical uses, which are universally recognized, and which are identical with the uses of law.