And this is what happens. At every moment of life we find ourselves face to face with actual situations, to which the laws that we possess either do not apply at all, or apply only in the approximative way that we have seen; at every moment of life, we find ourselves without the guidance of the law, face to face with the indifferent and the indifferentiated. The practical man knows well that the laws were a mere help, merely a preparatory stage to action, and that he must in each case face the actual situation as it arises, intuite and perceive it in its originality, and perform his own action with originality. But he who has accepted the _legalitarian_ conception of the practical activity and has abandoned practical principles as useless or looked upon them as non-existent, now that he finds himself abandoned also by the laws, in which he had put too much trust, has no other guide on which to fall back save his own _will._ And will is not a guide but _the lack of a guide_; it is not action but inaction, that is to say, contradictory action; not activity, but passivity, not prudence and good, but imprudence and evil. Thus the legalitarian conception of practical principles produces neither more nor less than the death of the practical, installing passivity in the place of activity, evil in the place of good. The legalitarian theory, which proposes to fix and to determine with precision the true concept of freedom, arrives at just the opposite result: the will. [Sidenote: _Ethical legalism as simply a particular case of practical legalism._]