[1] _Eth. Nicom._1. v. c. i, 1129 b. II CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ETHICAL FORM [Sidenote: _Exclusion of materialistic and of intellectualistic criticisms._] The distinction of the two forms, well known to the inner consciousness, will appear more clearly when we examine the reasons for which the one or the other of them has been denied. We say the one or the other, because we have now freed ourselves from the obligation of refuting the theses that have their origin in presuppositions, both materialistic and intellectualiste, and therefore deny the moral and economic activities, either because they do not admit the concept of spiritual activity itself, or because they do not admit the more special conception of practical activity. The greater number of those who deny morality are nothing but mechanicists, empiricists, materialists, and positivists, to whose brains not only do economy and morality appear inconceivable, but also art and science and, in short, every spiritual value. They ask: Where is this moral principle of which you discourse? Point it out to us with your finger. But they also ask: Where are the categories or the pure concept? Where is the æsthetic synthesis and the pure intuition? Where is the _a priori_ of perception and of history? Where are all these fine things you talk of as though they existed, and that we neither see nor touch?--And for our part, we can henceforth let them say what they will, only praying in our hearts that God may illuminate them and make them discover (at least when they are near to death and the dense veil of their bodies has become more thin) that if the universals were _things_ that it was possible to perceive as we do individual things, they would not be universals. [Sidenote: _The two possible negations._] When the double assumption of a spiritual activity and of a practical form of it has been admitted, it is not possible to do otherwise than either to deny the economic for the moral form, or the moral for the economic. What might seem to be a third possibility, that of denying the two forms, is reducible to the first, because, when the distinction of the terms has been suppressed, there remains nothing but the practical activity considered in general, which coincides with the individual and economic activity. We shall begin then with the examination of the negation of morality for economy, which is the thesis of _utilitarianism._ Those same materialists have recourse to utilitarianism when they wish to present some sort of a Philosophy of the practical, but with what little right they avail themselves of such aid, is clear from what has already been said: the useful is always value and teleology, and materialism, in all its sub-forms and varieties, is incapable of positing the smallest concept of value and finality. [Sidenote: _The thesis of utilitarianism against the existence of moral acts._]