It has already been noted in general that only personal beings can be moral agents or become, in what they are and do, objects of moral judgment. Apart from personality, no place for virtue or vice can be found. Of things, whether natural products or products of human industry, as rock or star or stream, or ship or watch or engine, we cannot predicate moral character. We may speak of them as beautiful, useful, or perfect, or as ugly, useless, or faulty, but all distinctly ethical terms are inapplicable to them. The moral approbation or condemnation which we feel for the temper, words, and actions of men is felt toward them as personal phenomena. Detached from personality they would no more be subjects of praise or blame than the temperature of the sea, the noise of the wind, or the down-pour of rain Moral character belongs to them only as the characteristics and manifestations of the self-conscious and self-directed life of a moral agent. To the question what activities of a moral agent may have ethical quality, it ought to be sufficient to say that it belongs to all his conscious and self-directed conduct. Obligation claims sway over the whole personality. But for clearness and definiteness, it is necessary to specify. ==Personal Actions.== =1.= The action itself, in its external form, may be right or wrong, as in conformity to moral relations or incongruous with them. It may be either the deed that is due to the relations and a fulfilment of the duty they call for, or it may be one that clashes with their rational and actual requirement. It may be in itself just the action in which conduct is rightly adjusted to the actual relations--an act that ought to appear in them. Or it may be in itself an action whose very form contradicts the moral demand of the relations, and which ought not to be done, no matter how good a motive may prompt the deed. For example, the motive to use them in a worthy charity could never justify a theft of goods or money, nor could filial care of a helpless parent be in itself wrong, even should a bad motive inspire it. Moral law repudiates the first deed; it condemns the wrong motive in the second, but declares the material of the deed itself to be right and good.