Since man’s action, his volition-action, is free, the question whether an individual has or has not been free to do what he has done is equivalent to asking if he has done it or not. Thus again the character of responsibility is emphasised in all human actions. Croce objects very strongly to the way in which criminal lawyers put a poor madman on a level with the guilty, for he who is mad is partially dead. Practical good and evil can be now identified with will and anti-will, with freedom and anti-freedom, with the reality of the will and its unreality. For evil, when real, does not exist save in the good, which opposes and conquers it; it is, therefore, merely the negative of good, and it would be impossible to find an act of will distinctly willing that which is evil as such. A man may want to intoxicate himself with alcohol, but in the act of so doing he expects the warmth that will spread in his limbs and the delightful oblivion that will free him from all cares. Hence that which he expects from drink is good. Such negativity of evil has always been current among theologians even before the days of Thomas Aquinas; but the theory deduced by Croce from it is quite original. All practical activity is either economic, or both economic and moral. The economic activity is that which wills and effects only what corresponds to the condition of fact in which a man finds himself; the ethical activity, although it corresponds to these conditions, is that which transcends them. Therefore, any act of the individual’s will is economic, but to be moral it must be an act of the universal will. The former is judged by the greater or less coherence of the action in itself, the other by its greater or less coherence in respect to the universal end which transcends the individual. No act can be moral without being economic, for however universal it may be in its meaning my action must be mine in order to be something concrete and individually determined. In practical life we do not meet with morality as a universal, but always with a determinate moral volition. On the other hand, it is easy to see that our actions always obey a rational law, even when moral law is suppressed; so that, when every inclination that transcends the individual has been set aside, it is necessary to will this or that coherently, not to oscillate between two or more volitions at the same time. And if we succeed in really obtaining our desire, if, while the moral consciousness is for the moment suspended within us, we abandon ourselves to the execution of a project of vengeance and execute a masterpiece of ability, even when, in this case, human society does not approve, we for our part feel satisfied, at least so long as the suspension of the moral consciousness lasts; for we have done what we wanted to do, we have tasted, though but for a little while, the pleasure of the gods.