All would go very well, and the practical activity would in this way be entirely explained and unified, if we did not at every moment of life run against the distinction between mere pleasure and duty, between the useful and the honest action, and if there did not arise in our conscience an invincible distinction between the things that have a price and those that have none, and if an abyss did not differentiate among apparently similar actions that which has a merely utilitarian from that which has a moral motive. The utilitarians even (who, although bad philosophers, are men, and as such carry at the bottom of their souls a far better philosophy than they profess in books and in the schools) are not able to suppress that distinction in themselves and to deny all recognition to the power of morality, to which, as men, they submit at every moment. How then are they to behave? How are they to explain the genesis of that distinction which, by the premises that they have posited, cannot be other than illusion? What is there that gives effective existence to the fallacious category of morality, side by side with the veracious one of utility? [Sidenote: _Attempt to explain them as quantitative distinctions._] There have been several attempts to solve that hard resisting term of morality. The first, which was logically bound to present itself, was that of considering facts called moral as nothing but empirical groups of utilitarian facts, and of explaining the false category as an hypostasis of those empirical groups, arbitrarily reduced to a rigorous and philosophical concept. Banking, usury, commerce, industry, agriculture, and labour are empirically distinguished, yet are all economic facts. Courage, prudence, temperance, chastity, justice, modesty are empirically distinguished, yet are all moral facts. Why not unite the two series, and recognize the unity and continuity of nature by the insertion among them of other types and terms? Morality is also utility, but the utility of the _greater number_; interest is interest, but _well understood_; pleasure is pleasure, but pleasure of _greater duration and quantity,_ preferred to another less intense, or more fugitive; egoism, egoism of family, of race, of human race, egoism of _species,_ altruism; eudemonism, but _social_ eudemonism, enjoyment, but enjoyment of _sympathy,_ utility, but utility of conforming, not to one's own individual judgment, but to that of _public opinion._ Thus are moral facts included in utilitarian, in the same way as the number a hundred thousand is not less a number than two or three and the others inferior to it, because it is composed of three and of two and of other numbers less than itself. Cæsar Borgia murders his brother and thus gets rid of a rival both in love and in politics, that is, he seeks his advantage; but Giordano Bruno also seeks his own advantage, and nothing else, when he allows himself to be burned in order to