to the dignity of _laws of nature_ (reason), there was a rebellion against the economists, by which it was made clear that those laws of nature were laws, not absolute, but empirical, that is to say, historical and contingent facts, and that the economists who propounded them as absolute, were not at all men of science, but politicians, and represented (if not seriously, at least by unconscious suggestion, or, if it be preferred, by mere chance) the interests of certain definite classes or of certain definite peoples. And the rebellion was right, although it afterwards degenerated into the inconclusiveness of historicism, and absolutely denied to those false practical applications the formulæ and laws of Economy, which are _natural_ in quite another sense, as nominal and therefore irrefutable definitions. Abstract principles, which are always inadequate to grasp the richness of reality, supply with a simple instrument him who passes from them to historical and sociological observation, which requires altogether different methods. Hence, for instance, the meaning of the school of Le Play, which in studying concrete economic conditions took note of religion, of family and political feelings, and of all the other things connected with the first; hence the admitted necessity of completing the analytic method (as it is called) with the synthetic, or (as it would be preferable to say) of neglecting abstractions when dealing with the problems of life and of directly intuiting life itself. [Sidenote: _3rd. Transformation of the functions of the calculus into reality._] But what is particular to a philosophy that enters into hybrid wedlock with economic Science, is the transformation of those quantitative principles, of which we have seen the artificial origin, into effective reality. As a result, when this origin has not been observed, or has been forgotten, we may chance to hear the theories of Gossen on the decline of pleasures, as though they were "fundamental laws of human sensibility"; or that some _homo economicus_ has appeared, constructor of diagrams and calculator of degrees of utility and of curves of satisfaction, as though these were real things. Some false conceptions derive from economic principles transported into the philosophy of the practical, which we have already had occasion to refute, such as that of a _scale of values,_ which the volitional man is supposed to have before him whenever he deliberates, and that other of the embarrassment he experiences in choosing between _two equal goods;_ and finally the belief that man _wills things,_ whereas what he wills in reality is not things but actions. The comparisons, metaphors and symbols, taken from Economy and used in ordinary conversation, lead to the false belief that mathematical constructions and those of the economic calculus are the real processes of the psyche or of the Spirit.