A third group of material principles, called religious, which make morality to consist of conforming to the will of God and of the gods, is not intrinsically different from these. Where the idea of the transcendental and of religious mystery is introduced, there is darkness; and anything can be put into darkness. In the first place, nothing but darkness itself can be put there, and in this case the religious solution is agnosticism, confession of ignorance, such as we have hitherto treated, in criticizing theological utilitarianism or abstract ethical rigorism, which, by means of its insoluble contradictions, also leads to the idea of God and of mystery. But one's own will, caprice and individual interests can also be put there; and then religion becomes attachment to a being or to an order of beings, which, though they be imaginary, are not for that reason less individual; attachment to them is love or fear, sympathy or fear of the evil they can do, and tendency to avoid it by propitiation with prayers, adulation, gifts, services, worship. Religious principles, then, understood as material principles, also become converted, as all know, and we may add, know all too well, into utilitarian principles; because, through intently fixing the gaze upon this aspect of religion, they have forgotten to look at others more important and certainly more noble. [Sidenote: _Formal principle as affirmation of a merely logical exigency._] The ethical principle is not adequately expressed, either by the _altruistic_ concept, or by that of _natural formations_ and of _institutions,_ or by that of the _gods;_ because all of these are general concepts, or sometimes merely individual representations; they are certainly not universal concepts. And by the necessity of the universal and the insufficiency of the merely general and individual, the ethical principle must be _formal_ and not _material._ However (and here we enter into the new meaning of this word and into the new debate announced), the formal ethical principle has likewise been understood as not susceptible of extension beyond the enunciation of the character of universality, which the principle itself should possess. Its formula has seemed to be nothing but that of a _universal law,_ to which all men can conform in complete harmony among themselves; of _respect towards all beings,_ in the degree that appertains to each, of that which satisfies _the exigencies of reason and of conscience,_ and so on. Now the formality claimed by this and similar formulæ has nothing to do with the formality first claimed; and since in the preceding debate we took the side of those who maintain formal as against material Ethic, so here we must defend material against formal Ethic; or better, an Ethic that is not material against an Ethic that is not formal, save in the pretentions of those who thus baptize it. [Sidenote: _Critique of a formal ethic in this sense: tautologism._]