From the recognized precedence of philosophy over the practical judgment arises the confirmation of the impossibility of the psychological method as the foundation of a Philosophy of the practical. Descriptive psychology is based upon practical facts historically ascertained, or upon practical judgments. Hence, by proceeding from particular to particular, it is not only incapable of exhausting the infinite and of attaining to the real universal, but by the very choice of particular examples, which should be the foundation of philosophical research relating to the practical, it is under the necessity of first possessing a concept of the practical. Hence it stands between Scylla and Charybdis, between a vicious _progressus ad infinitum_ and a not less vicious circle. In this way is eliminated the problem, monstrous from whatever point of view it may arise, as to the historical origin of the practical activity (economy or morality). If these activities be categories, which constitute fact and judge it reflected in the spirit, they cannot have arisen historically, as contingent facts. When we prove the historical origin of anything, with that very proof we destroy its universal value. The fears of certain moralists lest, with the indication of the historical origin of morality, its value should come to be denied, have therefore been wrongly mocked. Certainly, if morality had a historical origin, it would also have an end, like all historical formations, even the most grandiose, the Empire of the East or the Empire of the West, the Hunnish Empire of Attila or the Mongolian Empire of Gengiskhan. The fear manifested by the moralists in question was then an instinctive horror of the incorrect method of philosophical psychology, which now presupposes, now destroys the categories that it would wish to establish. VII THE PRACTICAL METHOD, RULES AND CASUISTRY [Sidenote: _Justification of the psychological method and of empirical and descriptive disciplines._] In repeatedly rejecting the psychological method, as at the end of the last chapter, we have been very careful to make use of a cautious phraseology. Thus we have employed such expressions as "psycho-philosophical method," "speculative-descriptive method," and the like, in order to make it quite clear that our hostility is directed against that mixture, or rather against its introduction into Philosophy, but is not directed against Psychology itself, that is, descriptive psychology. This psychology has always been practised, since the world was world, and we all practise it at every instant, and could not propose to banish it from the spirit, save at the risk of going mad.