[Sidenote: _Value of all these theories as confused perception of the amoral character of justice._] All these errors, all these sterile tentatives have their origin, as has been said, in the lively consciousness of a distinction existing between right and morality and at the same time of the impossibility of determining this correctly, owing to lack of clarity as to the purely economic form of the practical activity. When the juridical activity has been identified with the economic and when juridical (economic) activity has in consequence been conceived as at once united with and distinct from morality, we are able to recognize that these attempts have nevertheless fulfilled a very useful function; that is to say, they have more or less energetically asserted and defended the position that there existed a characteristic distinction between right and morality and that it was necessary to seek for it. They are therefore far superior, notwithstanding their errors, to that confused ethical conception, which receives rights and morality indistinctly into its bosom, or to the utilitaristic conception, which arrives by a different route at the same indistinction. This merit belongs to the theories of the moral minimum, of justice, of the two justices and of the contest between positive and ideal rights; but in a much greater degree to that of compulsion, of exteriority, of the licit. With these last was almost unconsciously set in relief the fact that right obeys a law different from that of Ethic, and may be called _compelled and not free by comparison with it,_ because not founded upon the necessity of the universal; that in respect to the supreme _interiority_ of Ethic it can be considered as something _exterior;_ that in respect to the ethical imperative, it appears as something indifferentiated or _licit._ These are without doubt symbols, tautologies, vague and imprecise phrases, but efficacious in keeping the attention alert and in promoting doubt and research. [Sidenote: _Confirmations of this character in the ingenuous consciousness._]