Singular destiny of that power, so often misconceived, and yet so manifest! Strange confounding of will and desire, wherein the most opposite schools meet each other, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Condillac, the philosophy of the seventeenth century, and that of the eighteenth! One, a despiser of humanity, by an extreme and ill-understood piety, strips man of his own activity, in order to concentrate it in God; the other transfers it to nature. In both man is a mere instrument, nothing else than a mode of God or a product of nature. When desire is once taken as the type of human activity, there is an end of all liberty and personality. A philosophy, less systematic, by conforming itself to facts, carries through common sense to better results. By distinguishing between the passive phenomenon of desire and the power of freely determining self, it restores the true activity that characterizes human personality. The will is the infallible sign and the peculiar power of a real and effective being; for how could he who should be only a mode of another being find in his own borrowed being a power capable of willing and producing acts of which he should feel himself the cause, and the responsible cause? If the philosophy of sensation, by setting out from passive phenomena, cannot explain true activity, voluntary and free activity, we might regard it as demonstrated that this same philosophy cannot give a true doctrine of morality, for all ethics suppose liberty. In order to impose rules of action on a being, it is necessary that this being should be capable of fulfilling or violating them. What makes the good and evil of an action is not the action itself, but the intention that has determined it. Before every equitable tribunal, the crime is in the intention, and to the intention the punishment is attached. Where, then, liberty is wanting, where there is nothing but desire and passion, not even a shade of morality subsists. But we do not wish to reject, by the previous question, the ethics of sensation. We proceed to examine in itself the principle that they lay down, and to show that from this principle can be deduced neither the idea of good and evil, nor any of the moral ideas that are attached to it. 2d. According to the philosophy of sensation, the good is nothing else than the useful. By substituting the useful for the agreeable, without changing the principle, there has been contrived a convenient refuge against many difficulties; for it will always be possible to distinguish interest well understood from apparent and vulgar interest. But even under this somewhat refined form, the doctrine that we are examining none the less destroys the distinction between good and evil. If utility is the sole measure of the goodness of actions, I must consider only one thing when an action is proposed to me to do,--what advantages can result from it to me?