I. It is the singular merit of Kant to have put an end, once for all, to every material Ethic, by proving its utilitarian character: a merit that is not cancelled by the lacunæ that exist in other parts of his thought, entangling him unawares in the materialism and in the utilitarianism that he had surpassed. It would be anti-historical to desire to judge a thinker by the contradictions into which he falls and so to declare his work to be a failure and of no importance, when it is only imperfect. There are errors in all the works of man, and error is always contradiction; but he who has the eye of the historian discovers where lies the true strength of a thought and does not deny the light, because of necessity accompanied with shadow. Before Kant, ethic was either openly utilitarian or such that although presenting itself in the deceitful form of Ethic of sympathy, or religious Ethic, was yet reducible to utilitarianism. Kant conducted an implacable and destructive war, not only against admitted utilitarian forms, but also against those that were masked and spurious, called by him material Ethic. [Sidenote: _The predecessors of Kant._] In this too, his predecessors are to be found in traditional philosophy of Christian origin, or, if it be preferred, Platonic (opposition of material to formal Ethic can already be observed in the attitude of Aristotle to Plato). If the fathers and the scholastics had been divided as to the question of the relation between moral laws and the divine will, and many of them, especially the mystics, had made that law to depend upon the divine will and upon nothing else, yet views had not been wanting, according to which the power of changing at will the moral laws, that is to say, of changing his own essence, was denied to God, since he could not be _supra se._ Religious Ethic was cleansed of every admixture of arbitrarism and utilitarianism by this solution, accepted by nearly all religious thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (by Cudworth, by Malebranche, and finally by Leibnitz). On the other hand, we cannot but recognize that many other material formulæ used to be understood in an ideal, or, as we have said, in a symbolical manner; and certainly that very eudæmonism of Aristotle, toward which Kant showed himself too severe, was not the pleasure and happiness of the hedonists and utilitarians, and the mediety (μεσότης) proposed as the distinctive character of virtue, although without doubt empty and often incoherent, was already almost a formal principle. The same is to be said of the Stoic principle of _following nature_; and coming to the immediate predecessors of Kant, of that _perfectio_ already mentioned, which Kant, after wavering a little, reduced to happiness, not, however, without stating that it is a more indeterminate concept than any other. With Kant, however, the point was admitted, that the moral law is not to be expressed in any