the _complications_ of reality and felt the necessity of a morality less abstract and less disharmonic in relation to life, however incorrectly they may nevertheless have developed its theory. [1] 1 Cor. x. 23. [2] Pascal, _Prov._ 1. 7. [3] _Theol. moralis_ 7, Bassano, 1773, i. 168. V JUDICIAL ACTIVITY AS AN ACTIVITY GENERICALLY PRACTICAL (ECONOMIC) [Sidenote: _Legislative activity, as generically practical._] The will that wills classes of actions, or the activity that makes laws and that we can henceforward term _legislative activity_ without fear of misunderstanding, is either moral or merely economic; and therefore, when dialecticized, is either moral or immoral, economic or anti-economic. It is true that this will is abstract and indeterminate; but that does not prevent it from being, and from being obliged to be, either moral or merely economic; and, therefore, abstractly moral and abstractly economic, and so also abstractly immoral and anti-economic. A programme of action will be conceived, as they say, wisely or foolishly, to a good or to a bad end, for mere reasons of utility, or with a lively desire for good. The legislator is a volitional man, and as such to be judged both utilitarianly and morally. The laws that are his volitional product are useful or injurious, good or bad. This judgment is also without doubt abstract, for it is necessary first to see the legislator engaged in the practical act of the application of his law, in order to recognize what he can do and who he is. We know many (others or ourselves?) who make plans for the most beautiful lives, legislating admirably for themselves and for others; yet these show themselves mean and bad in action: and we not infrequently find the opposite case of men who calumniate themselves and who, after they have declared the most dishonest, or at least the most amoralistic, of intentions, when they find themselves face to face with the bad action, ugly with the ugliness of sin, say, as the old man in the fable said to Death: "I have not called thee!" [Sidenote: _Vanity of disputes as to the character of institutions, economic or ethic: punishment, matrimony, the State, etc._]