Of Economy (Husbandry). All normal economy(104) (husbandry) aims at securing a maximum of personal advantage with a minimum of cost or outlay.(105) And there are always two intellectual incentives at the foundation of this economy. There is, first, self-interest, the positive manifestation of which is the effort to acquire as much of the world’s goods as possible, and the negative expression of which, the effort to lose as little of them as possible—acquisitiveness—saving. Self-interest, losing its moral, and assuming a guilty, character, degenerates into egotism; acquisitiveness, into covetousness; and the disposition to save, into avarice—the _solipsismus_ of Kant. The incentive to ameliorate one’s condition is common to all men, no matter how varied the form or different the intensity of its manifestation. It guides us all from the cradle to the grave. It may be restricted within certain limits, but never entirely extinguished. It is, in the domain of economy, what the instinct of self-preservation is to our physical existence, a powerful principle of creation, preservation and of renewed life (I. Thessal., 4, 11, seq.).(106) Then there is the incentive of the demand of God’s voice within us, the voice of conscience, whether we call it, in philosophic outline “the adumbration of the ideas of equity, right, benevolence, of perfection and inner freedom,” or, framing our lives in accordance with them, the striving after the Kingdom of God.(107) It matters not, how much the image of God may have been disfigured in most men, there is no one in whom the longing for it has so far disappeared as to leave no trace behind. This puts bounds to our self-interest, and transmutes it into an earthly means to enable us to approximate to an eternal ideal.