Were it material, it would express itself by means of propositions indicating a single volition or a group of single volitions as the true and proper essence of the moral volition; and the moral activity would consist of a determinate action or of a determinate group of actions. But the moral act is always that which surpasses the single or the groups of singles: to will and to effect the single and the series of singles as such, does not appertain to the ethical, but to the merely economic form. He who loves things for things' sake (be they such, and as many as you will, of this or that kind, one, many, infinite) does not yet love the universal, which is everywhere, and is not exhausted in any particular thing, nor in any number of things, however immense. [Sidenote: _Reduction of material to utilitarian Ethic._] If we posit a material principle for Ethic, we relapse as a consequence into _utilitarianism,_ from which we thought we had escaped; because, after having asserted the universal, it is now determined, either as a single or (which amounts to the same thing) as a feigned universal, a simply general concept of group or series. This vicissitude, however, presents itself in every sphere of philosophy: when the universal and formal principle of that sphere is materialized, we return to the sphere immediately, below it. For example, an esthetic that posits as its principle certain single forms of art, thus substituting matter for form, relapses from art to life lived, which is the condition that precedes art and upon which art raises itself in order to intuite and to dominate life. Material Ethic has therefore been with reason discredited as heteronomous and utilitarian. Not indeed that it is so directly and admits itself so to be: on the contrary, it professes to be anti-utilitarian and does nothing directly, save to point to a given object as the true content of morality. But that object, being single, implies a merely utilitarian volition; and material Ethic is utilitarian, because, whatever it may do or say, it is logically reducible to utilitarianism. [Sidenote: _Rejection of material principles._] The rejection of all material character from the ethical principle is of the greatest importance, for it frees Ethic from a long series of concepts, each one of which has been proposed in turn as the true ethical principle, and several still find many supporters, both in ordinary thought and in treatises called scientific. For us, those concepts should not be examined comparatively, so as to arrive at preferring the one to the other, or a new one of the same type to all the concepts previously enunciated; but they are all false, for one and the same reason, as any other that may in future be excogitated will be false, if it contain in it anything material. [Sidenote: _Benevolence, love, altruism, etc.; and critique of them._]