We can now define the economic aspect of a situation in terms of our present illustration. The end which the lawyer had in view in a vague and tentative way was, as we saw, defined with reference to his ethical standards--that is to say, a certain measure of participation in the new work was determined as satisfactory at once to his ideals of devotion to the cause of social justice and to his sense of obligation to himself and to his family. In this sense, logically speaking, a subject was defined to which a system of predicates, comprehended perhaps under the general predicate of right or good, applies. Now, however, it appears, from the inspection of the material and social environment, that the execution of this purpose, perfectly in accord though it may be with the spiritual capacities and powers of the agent, is possible only on pain of certain other consequences, certain other sacrifices, which have not hitherto been considered. That a half-hearted interest in his profession would still not prevent his earning a moderate income from it was never questioned in the ethical "first approximation" to a final decision, but now the issue is fairly presented, and, as we must see, in a very difficult and distressing way; for the essence of the situation is that the ends now in conflict, that of earning a living and caring for his family and that of laboring for the social good, are not intrinsically (that is, from the standpoint of the empirical self) incompatible. On the contrary, these two ends are psychologically quite compatible, as the outcome of the ethical judgment shows; only the "external" conditions oppose them to each other. The difficulty of the case lies, then, just in the fact that the conflicting ends, both standing, as they do, for strong personal interests of the self, nevertheless cannot be brought to an adjustment by the direct method of an apportionment between them of the "spiritual resources" or "energies" of the self. Instead, the case is one calling for an apportionment of the external means, and so, proximately, not for immediate determination of the final end, but for economic determination of the means.