This combined identity and difference of the useful and the moral, of the economic and the ethical, explains the success at the present time and formerly of the utilitarian theory of Ethics. Indeed it is easy to discover and to illustrate a utilitarian side in every moral action; as it is easy to reveal the æsthetic side in every logical proposition. The criticism of ethical utilitarianism cannot begin by denying this truth and seeking out absurd and non-existent examples of _useless_ moral actions. It must admit the utilitarian side and explain it as the concrete form of morality, which consists in this, that it is _inside_ this form. Utilitarians do not see this inside. This is not the place for the fuller development that such ideas deserve. Ethics and Economics cannot however fail to be gainers (as we have said of Logic and Æsthetic) by a more exact determination of the relations that exist between them. Economic science is now rising to the activistical concept of the useful, as it attempts to surpass the mathematical phase in which it is still entangled; a phase which was in its turn a progress when it superseded historicism, or the confusion of the theoretical with the historical, and destroyed a number of capricious distinctions and false economic theories. With this conception, it will be easy on the one hand to absorb and to verify the semi-philosophical theories of so-called pure economics, and on the other, by the introduction of successive complications and additions, to effect a transition from the philosophical to the empirical or naturalistic method and thus to embrace the particular theories expounded in the so-called political or national economy of the schools. [Sidenote: _Phenomenon and noumenon in practical activity._] As æsthetic intuition knows the phenomenon or nature, and the philosophic concept the noumenon or spirit; so the economic activity wills the phenomenon or nature, and the moral activity the noumenon or spirit. _The spirit which wills itself,_ its true self, the universal which is in the empirical and finite spirit: that is the formula which perhaps defines the essence of morality with the least impropriety. This will for the true self is _absolute freedom._ VIII EXCLUSION OF OTHER SPIRITUAL FORMS