But it was not enough to set apart the sacred principle, the central hearth-fire of truth and goodness. If at an earlier stage,--earlier, i.e. in this logical analysis,--the formal was wholly sunk in the material, if i. e. the mere series of legal formulae in their hard and brittle outlines were absolutely identified--without doubt or hesitation--with the morally and socially good; the formal side, or mere spirit and will of good, the abstract principle of morality, is now invested with an equally undue prominence. The actual or concrete ethical community--be it family or state, or other social organisation--is animated and maintained by a spirit which transcends and includes alike the outward shell of civil law and the inward law of conscience. For, curiously enough, as it may seem at first, both conscience and civil legislation assume the form of imperative and definite commands--laws political or civil, and laws moral. Both fall therefore into an inflexibility, a rigorous and mechanical hardness in their enouncements. Both worship the lord of what men call logic, i. e. of formal consistency and formal uniformity, to an excess which sometimes issues in fantastic irregularities. Their several maxims of legal conformity and of duty for duty's sake are in first appearance excellent: but a further reflection shows that the Law covers a good many inconsistent or at least unrelated laws within its code, and Duty is often sadly to seek in presence of the collisions between what offer themselves as _prima facie_ duties in any given case. The amplest code of laws that ever existed will always leave lots of loop-holes for negligence and villainy, and would never work for an instant, were it not for ever supplemented by the spirit of faith and love, by social piety and political loyalty, by the thousand ties of sentiment and feeling which really vivify its dry bones. So too the abstractions of the conscientious imperative, of the law of duty, of the moral tribunal, of the man within the breast, and of the dignity and beauty of human nature, would effect nothing unless they could always tacitly count on the support of recognised and authoritative social law and usage. Outward rests upon inward; and rules direct feelings.