CONFUSION BETWEEN LAWS AND PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES. CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL LEGALISM AND OF JESUITIC MORALITY [Sidenote: _Transformation of principles into practical laws: legalism._] Nothing perhaps better makes clear the true nature of laws than the examination of the very grave errors introduced by their means into the Philosophy of the practical: for, owing to the failure to perceive the character of mere _aid_ proper to their function, laws have been confused with practical principles, these being looked upon as laws and those as principles. [Sidenote: _Genesis of the concept of the practically licit and indifferent._] We always live surrounded by innumerable laws, although these are always finite in number. The Decalogue also admonishes: "Take not the name of God in vain"; "Honour thy father and thy, mother"; "Thou shalt not steal"; "Thou shalt commit no murder"; "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, nor his wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his"; etc. The decalogue or hectalogue of prudence admonishes us: "Raise not up against thee too many enemies "; "Mind your own business"; "Conciliate him who is more powerful than thou"; "Hurt him who hurts thee"; etc. Those laws that are so many and so minute easily lead to the false belief that they suffice together to regulate our economic action and our moral life, and that practical principles can be substituted for and be fully represented by a Decalogue or code, which should be the true and proper regulator of human life. But the Decalogue, the code, the _Corpus juris,_ ample and minute though they be, are not, as we know, capable of exhausting the infinity of actions conditioned by the infinite variety of facts. Every law brings with it, as its necessary correlative, as the shadow of its light, actions that are indifferent and indifferentiable, the legally indifferent, the licit, the permissible, the right, the faculty of doing or of not doing. As an inevitable consequence of this, practical principles having been conceived as a series or complex of laws, the concept of the _practically indifferent_ must also be posited and the _licit_ changed from _legal_ to _practical._ [Sidenote: _Consequence of this: the arbitrary._]