without infamy and without praise. Art has celebrated in tragedies and poems the strong characters of great criminals, but it has turned to ridicule in comedies little criminals, the violent who show themselves timid, the astute who let themselves be cheated. [Sidenote: _The ethical form._] As we cannot fail to recognize this form of the practical activity, quite individual, hedonistic, utilitarian, and economic, and the importance that it possesses, joined to or separated from morality, as the case may be, and the special practical judgments that have their origin in it (the judgment of convenience, whether it be called utilitarian or economic), so it would be impossible not to recognize the moral form. Yes, the volitional act satisfies us as individuals occupying a definite point of time and space, but if it fail to satisfy us at the same time as beings transcending time and space, our satisfaction will be ephemeral and will rapidly be changed into dissatisfaction. To one desire succeeds another, and to this another, and so on to infinity; but the one is different from the other, and the new either condemns the old or is by it condemned. If we succeed in arranging our pleasures in series and classes, and in subordinating and connecting them, certainly there will be some gain; but the gain will not have been a true one on this occasion either. We shall at the most be able to guide our life according to some plan, and for a certain time that has not the exactitude of the moment; instead of the instantaneous will to which succeeds a different will, we shall have general ends for which we shall work. We shall propose, for instance, to do certain work and to abstain from doing certain other work, in order to marry a loved one, to win a seat in Parliament, or to obtain literary fame. But those ends are also merely contingent (they are general, not universal), and consequently cannot assuage our thirst. When we all have attained to them, we shall experience _le déboire_ that _la cueillaison d'un rêve au cœur qui l'a cueilli_ always leaves behind. The company of the fair beloved will weary, the political ambition realized will leave the soul empty, literary fame will seem the shadow of vanity. Perhaps too, we shall change our side, like the sick man who cannot rest on his bed of feathers, and begin to follow other ends; the lover deluded with matrimony will turn to other loves; the ambitious man, weary of political life, will think of new ambitions, or of that of not having any, and of retiring to so-called domestic peace; the seeker for literary fame will long for ease, silence, and forgetting. But in vain: dissatisfaction persists. And it will always persist, and pallid Care will always sit behind us, on the croup of our horse, if we are not able to tear from the contingent its character of contingent, breaking its spell, and bringing ourselves to a full stop in that _progressus ad infinitum_ from thing to thing, from