I. Greek Ethic and its ingenuousness--II. Importance of Christianity for Ethic--The three tendencies that result from it: utilitarianism, rigorism, and psychologism--Hobbes, Spinoza--English Ethic--Idealistic Philosophy--III. E. Kant and his affirmation of the ethical principle--Contradictions of Kant as to the concept of the useful, of prudence, of happiness, etc.--Errors that derive from it in his Ethic--IV. Points for a Philosophy of Economy--The inferior appetitive faculty--Problem of politics and Machiavellism--Doctrine of the passions--Hegel and the concept of the useful--Fichte and the elaboration of the Kantian Ethic--V. The problem of the useful and of morality in the thinkers of the nineteenth century--Extrinsic union of Ethic and of economic Science, from antiquity to the nineteenth century--Philosophic questions arising from a more intimate contact between the two--VII. Theories of the hedonistic calculus: from Maupertuis to Hartmann. SECOND SECTION THE ETHICAL PRINCIPLE I CRITIQUE OF MATERIALISTIC AND OF FORMALISTIC ETHIC 425 Various meanings of "formal" and "material"--The ethical principle as formal (universal) and not material (contingent)--Reduction of material Ethic to utilitarian Ethic--Expulsion of material principles--Benevolence, love, altruism, etc.; and critique of them--Social organism, State, interest of the species, etc. Critique of them--Material religious principles. Critique of them--"Formal" as statement of a merely logical demand--Critique of a formal Ethic with this meaning: tautologism--Tautological principles: ideal, chief good, duty, etc. Critique of them--Tautological significance of certain formulæ, material in appearance--Conversion of tautological Ethic into material and utilitarian Ethic--In what sense Ethic should be formal; and in what other sense material. II THE ETHICAL FORM AS ACTUALIZATION OF THE SPIRIT IN UNIVERSAL 440 Tautological Ethic, and its partial or discontinuous connection with Philosophy--Rejection of both these conceptions--The ethical form as volition of the universal--The universal as the Spirit (Reality, Liberty, etc.)--Moral actions as volitions of the Spirit--Critique of antimoralism--Confused tendency of tautological, material, religious formulæ in relation to the Ethic of the Spirit--The Ethic of the Spirit and religious Ethic. III HISTORICAL NOTES 452 I. Merit of the Kantian Ethic--The predecessors of Kant--Defect of that Ethic: agnosticism--Critique of Hegel and of others--Kant and the concept of freedom--Fichte and Hegel--Ethic in the nineteenth century. THIRD PART LAWS I LAWS AS PRODUCTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL 465