life is conditioned for each of us, and we must guarantee and defend it as vehicle of the universal, and we must be ready to throw it away, as a useless and pernicious thing, when it does not serve this end, or rebels. But the value of every being dear to us is not less conditioned, and Jesus said with reason, when preparing himself for his divine mission, that he had come to separate men from their wives, their sons, their friends, and from their native land. That separation in union, that union in separation, is the moral activity, individual and universal. [Sidenote: _Confirmed by facts._] Thus it happens that art, which has celebrated strong characters, able men and affairs well conducted, has also celebrated, and with greater liveliness, those strong men who have placed their strength at the service of that other strength which surpasses them and makes them eternal. For this reason, no embittered soul, no sceptic and pessimist remains long firm in his negation of all moral light; such negations are indeed as a rule true _amantium irae. _ The singer of the lesser Brutus who had thus ferociously imprecated: Foolish Virtue, hollow mists and fields Of restless ghosts Are thy schools, and Repentance turns her back upon thee,... is the same who, on witnessing a slight act of generosity, exclaims with emotion: Fair Virtue, when my spirit becomes aware of thee, It exults, as at a joyous event.... The coldest and most self-contained philosophers, when they speak of it, find themselves sometimes impelled to adopt a poetic tone, and Aristotle will say of Justice that it is "a more wonderful thing than Hesperus or the Morning Star,"[1] and Emmanuel Kant will compose an apostrophe to Duty, and will write at the end of the _Critique of Practical Reason_: "Two things fill the soul with ever new and ever increasing veneration and admiration the more often and the longer reflection is occupied with them: _the starry heaven_ above me, and _the moral law_ within me." And even the great mass of rhetoric that has for its object virtue or the moral law is a homage rendered to this supreme force of life, reality of reality. The impossibility of suppressing the economic or the moral form of the activity in our practical consciousness, the continual appeal that the one makes to the other, the revolving of our practical judgment about the two aspects, both of them necessary, of the useful and the honest, energy and goodness, pleasure and duty, explain why the Psychology and the Description of practical life have constituted the two kinds of types and classes, of economic and of moral men, of economic and of moral institutions. Such rough and approximate distinctions have however at bottom, in this as in other cases, an intimate and rigorous distinction, which every one will find evident in himself, if he look inward upon himself and fix his gaze persistently on the universal forms of the spirit that acts within him.