Another error of this system is that it confounds the good itself with one of its applications. If the good is the greatest interest of the greatest number, the consequence is clear, that there are only public and social ethics, and no private ethics; there is only a single class of duties, duties towards others, and there are no duties towards ourselves. But this is retrenching precisely those of our duties that most surely guarantee the exercise of all the rest.[209] The most constant relations that I sustain are with that being which is myself. I am my own most habitual society. I bear in myself, as Plato[210] has well said, a whole world of ideas, sentiments, desires, passions, emotions, which claim a legislation. This necessary legislation is suppressed. Let us also say a word on a system that, under sublime appearances, conceals a vicious principle. There are persons who believe that they are magnifying God, by placing in his will alone the foundation of the moral law, and the sovereign motive of humanity in the punishments and rewards that it has pleased him to attach to the respect and violation of his will. Let us understand what we are about in a matter of such delicacy. It is certain, and we shall establish it for the good,[211] as we have done for the true and the beautiful,[212] it is certain that, from explanations to explanations, we come to be convinced that God is definitively the supreme principle of ethics, so that it may be very truly said, that the good is the expression of his will, since his will is itself the expression of the eternal and absolute justice that resides in him. God wills, without doubt, that we should act according to the law of justice that he has put in our understanding and our heart; but it is not at all necessary to conclude that he has arbitrarily instituted this law. Far from that, justice is in the will of God only because it has its roots in his intelligence and wisdom, that is to say, in his most intimate nature and essence. While making, then, every reservation in regard to what is true in the system that founds ethics on the will of God, we must show what there is in this system, as it is presented to us, false, arbitrary, and incompatible with ethics themselves.[213]