(b) _This ethical system also tends in practice to a legal view of conduct._--Historically it always has sprung from carrying over legal ideas into morality. In the legal view, liability to blame and to punishment inflicted from without by some superior authority, is necessarily prominent. Conduct is regulated through specific injunctions and prohibitions: Do this, Do not do that. Exactly the sort of analysis of which we have spoken above (p. 327) in the case of killing is necessary, so that there may be definite and regular methods of measuring guilt and assigning blame. Now the ideas of liability and punishment and reward are, as we shall see in our further discussion (chs. xvii. and xxi.), important factors in the conduct of life, but any scheme of morals is defective which puts the question of avoiding punishment in the foreground of attention, and which tends to create a Pharisaical complacency in the mere fact of having conformed to command or rule. (c) _Probably the worst evil of this moral system is that it tends to deprive moral life of freedom and spontaneity_ and to reduce it (especially for the conscientious who take it seriously) to a more or less anxious and servile conformity to externally imposed rules. Obedience as loyalty to principle is a good, but this scheme practically makes it the only good and conceives it not as loyalty to ideals, but as conformity to commands. Moral rules exist just as independent deliverances on their own account, and the right thing is merely to follow them. This puts the center of moral gravity outside the concrete processes of living. All systems which emphasize the letter more than the spirit, legal consequences more than vital motives, put the individual under the weight of external authority. They lead to the kind of conduct described by St. Paul as under the law, not in the spirit, with its constant attendant weight of anxiety, uncertain struggle, and impending doom.