The absence of intelligence, which I shall term _incapacity_, is the one absolutely fatal defect from which life may suffer. Incapacity embraces maladaptation, dulness, feebleness, {84} sickness, and death. Like its opposite it does not enter into the moral account except in so far as it affects a group of interests, through being prejudicial to an individual's efficiency or a community's welfare; but it will impair and annul attainment upon any plane. The fault of incapacity attaches not only to life that is rudimentary or defective, but also to the mechanical processes which have not been assimilated to any interest and thus lie outside the realm of value. Incapacity in this sense is that metaphysical evil of which philosophers speak. It testifies to the fact that the cosmos is only partially subject to judgments either of good or of evil; that value has a genesis and a history within an environment that is at best plastic and progressively submissive. In terms of intelligence and incapacity, the basal excellence and the basal fault, it is possible to define that whole affair of which morality is the constructive phase: the attempt of life to establish itself in the midst of primordial lifelessness, to avert dissolution and death, and to extend and amplify itself to the uttermost. Within the economy of the simple interest there is no possibility of formalism, since there is no subordination of interest to anything higher than itself. But we meet here with materialism in its purest form. _Overindulgence_ is the fault {85} which attaches to the exclusive insistence of the isolated interest on itself; when it grows head-strong, and is like to defeat itself through being blindly preoccupied.