persuasion of others; and as exteriority, certain classes of actions opposed to certain others; so that, for example, the deportment of an individual as communal or provincial councillor would belong to external life, his relations with his confessor or with his Æsculapius to internal life. But compulsion and exteriority, reduced to these meanings, become gross and empirical concepts, of which no use can be made in philosophy and which therefore cannot be of the least value as qualifying and distinguishing law from morality. In the same way, no value is to be attached to such a distinction, when determined from what is licit to what is commanded, from rights to duties, from what is permitted to what is obligatory; because licit and commanded, rights and duties, from what is permitted to what is obligatory, are correlative concepts constituting an indissoluble nexus and it is not possible to separate and to oppose them to one another. [Sidenote: _Moralistic theories of rights: critique._] The difficulty of conveniently fixing the distinction with the characters indicated, leads one to think of a different sort of tentative, according to which rights would certainly be distinguished from ethicity, not placed above or beside it, but rather in the very sphere of morality itself, as the species in respect to the genus or the part in respect of the whole. Juridical action would be moral, but it would belong to the inferior levels of morality; it would be occupied with the execution of simple _justice,_ with the establishment of order, proportion, equality; whereas morality would represent _more than justice,_ and would upset the equilibrium of rights with benevolence, generosity, sacrifice, heroism. Rights (it is also said) are limited to the _ethical minimum,_ while morality strives for the _maximum;_ rights are concerned with strict rights or _perfect_ duties, morality with meritorious and supererogatory actions, _imperfect_ duties. But these determinations also pretend to separate the inseparable, by drawing an arbitrary line of division between small and great actions, between least and greatest, and they employ concepts that are altogether empirical, as, for instance, that of justice as distinct from benevolence, of the strictly obligatory from the meritorious and supererogatory; and worse still than this, metaphors and symbols, such as equality, order, regularity; or they operate directly with the arithmetical and geometrical proportion of actions. And consciously or unconsciously a return is made to Ethic pure and simple, with the theories that make juridical activity to consist of the recognition of others as _persons,_ or with the search for _general utility_ (superindividual). When we act in view of the _person_ in other individuals (or in oneself), or of the useful, which is not the useful for the individual, but although it comprehends, yet transcends it:--the merely juridical conscience has already been surpassed, it has