There is no thesis, however absurd, which cannot be defended with such a method. All know that there are aristocratic and democratic philosophers, libertarian and authoritarian, anarchical and organicist, socialistic and anti-socialistic, bellicose and pacific, feminist and antifeminist; and there are others who maintain the right to lie, the right to suicide, the right to prostitution, the right to incest, to making of themselves caterers for the scaffold, the right to the penalty of death. These solutions can be morally and politically justified in certain definite and particular cases. There are other solutions rationally unjustifiable in the individual case and put forward only through passion, wickedness, or prejudice, but in both hypotheses, they are outside philosophy and within it so false as to be odious, as that is odious which is maintained, not by means of intrinsic reason, but by imposition altogether extrinsic and external. [Sidenote: _Reason of the rebellion against rules._] Such hatefulness explains the rebellion against moral rules and concepts that has often taken place. This, together with that against literary classes and rules and others of the same sort, forms part of the vast movement of rebellion against empirical or empiricized philosophy. In truth, when those rules and ideas are taken by themselves, no rebellion is possible, because they do not exert any pressure and obey the orders of the man who has made them. But it happens otherwise, when they become rigid and philosophical, and as is said, absolute, claiming to substitute themselves as such for philosophy and to provide a base for judgments. In addition to this, from the enforced union of philosophemes with rules, has arisen the false idea of philosophizing about the practical (about an Ethic, for example), which showed itself to be _practical,_ or, as is said, _normative._ [Sidenote: _Limits between philosophy and empiria._] Philosophy, by taking part in empirical questions, ruins both itself and them, because it loses the serenity, the dignity, and the utility that are intrinsic to it. In like manner, the empirical disciplines ruin themselves and philosophy when they claim to philosophize with their classes, which are not categories, with their pseudo-concepts, which are not concepts, with their _generalia,_ which are not _universalia._ Here too, safety lies in distinction: the observation of distinction alone makes possible beneficent co-operation. IX HISTORICAL ANNOTATIONS