When we identify the empirical laws with the universal practical principles, economic or ethic, we fall into "legalism," which can be defined as the belief that universal principles can be definitely embodied in a limited number of laws, and that, on the other hand, these laws partake of the character of absoluteness which belongs to those principles. It is especially in the treatment of ethics that this confusion has caused its worst effects. The two outstanding types of legalists are the Jesuit, who admits of the morally indifferent, the justification through the intention, the pious fraud, and other practical means for the purely literal observance of the law, supposed to be a sufficient satisfaction of the moral obligation, and the Puritan, who maintains that the unchangeable letter of the law is the only, and always certain, guide of the moral consciousness. Both Jesuit and Puritan, or to give them the names they assumed in a historical controversy, both Molinist and Jansenist, have often been in practice much better than their theories; but we are here interested only in their theoretical pronouncements, which, though apparently contrasting, yet combine in substituting the letter for the spirit, and in drying up, in the name of morality, the living springs of moral activity. And in both cases, moral legalism is associated with theological utilitarianism; it is, in fact, but another aspect of the same error. The will that wills classes of actions, the legislative activity, is either moral or merely economic, and can therefore be judged as either moral or immoral, economic or anti-economic. But as the laws are will in the abstract, our judgment of the laws will also be an abstract judgment. To pronounce a concrete judgment, we must turn to the moment of the execution of the law, to the individual practical action, in which the law realizes itself. In this sphere, it is vain to dispute whether a law is essentially economic or moral: the economic or moral character of the law is not determined by the abstract intention of the legislator, but by the manner of its execution, by the quality of the individual executor. The punishment which a law assigns for a category of crimes may be intended by the legislator either to deter or to emend the criminal; but in the man who abstains from that particular kind of crime, the law is an economic one if the abstention is entirely due to the fear of the punishment, it is a moral one if it coincides with a sincere abhorrence of the crime. No law, therefore, can be said to be intrinsically moral, and if we want to define the legislative activity in its full extension, we must define it as generically practical or merely economic.