The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic. Benedetto Croce

of individual and social laws—Individual laws as the sole real in ultimate analysis—Critique of the division of laws into judicial and social, and into the sub-classes of these. Empiricity of every division of laws—Extension of the concept of laws.

      II 481

      THE CONSTITUTIVE ELEMENTS OF LAWS. CRITIQUE OF PERMISSIVE LAWS AND OF NATURAL LAW

      The volitional character and the character of class—Distinction of laws from the so-called laws of nature—Implication of the second in the first—Distinction of laws from practical principles—Laws and single acts—Identity of imperative, prohibitive, and permissive laws—Permissive character of every law and impermissive character of every principle—Changeability of laws—Empirical considerations as to modes of change—Critique of the eternal Code or natural right—Natural right as the new right—Natural right as Philosophy of the practical—Critique of natural right—Theory of natural right persisting in judicial judgments and problems.

      III 497

      UNREALITY OF LAW AND REALITY OF EXECUTION. FUNCTION OF LAW IN THE PRACTICAL SPIRIT

      Law as abstract and unreal volition—Ineffectually of laws and effectuality of practical principles—Exemplificatory explanation—Doctrines against the utility of laws—Their unmaintainability—Unmaintainability of confutations of them—Empirical meaning of these controversies—Necessity of laws—Laws as preparation for action—Analogy between practical and theoretical Spirit: practical laws and empirical concepts—The promotion of order in reality and in representation—Origin of the concept of plan or design.

      IV 511

      CONFUSION BETWEEN LAWS AND PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES. CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL LEGALISM AND OF JESUITIC MORALITY

      Transformation of principles into practical laws: legalism—Genesis of the concept of the practically licit and indifferent—Its consequence: the arbitrary—Ethical legalism as a simple special case of the practical—Critique of the practically indifferent—Contests of rigorists and of latitudinarians and their common error—Jesuitic morality as doctrine of fraud on moral law—Concept of legal fraud—Absurdity of fraud against oneself and against the moral conscience—Jesuitic morality not explainable by mere legalism—Jesuitic morality as alliance of legalism with theological utilitarianism—Distinction between Jesuitic practice and doctrine.

      V 526

      JUDICIAL ACTIVITY AS GENERICALLY PRACTICAL ACTIVITY (ECONOMIC)

      Legislative activity as generically practical—Vanity of disputes as to the character of institutions, whether economic or ethical: punishment, marriage, State, etc.—Legislative activity as economic—Judicial activity: its economic character: its consequent identity with economic activity—Non-recognition of economic form, and meaning of the problem as to distinction between morality and rights—Theories of co-action and of exteriority, as distinctive characteristics: critique of them—Moralistic theories of rights: critique—Duality of positive and ideal rights, historical and natural rights, etc.; absurd attempts at unification and co-ordination—Value of all these attempts as confused glimpse of amoral character of rights—Confirmations of this character in ingenuous conscience—Comparison between rights and language. Grammar and codes—Logic and language; morality and rights—History of language as literary and artistic history—History of rights as political and social history.

      VI 543

      HISTORICAL NOTES

      I. Distinction between morality and rights, and its importance for the history of the economic principle—Indistinction lasting till Tomasio—II. Tomasio and followers—Kant and Fichte—Hegel—Herbart and Schopenhauer—Rosmini and others—III. Stahl, Ahrens, Trendelenburg—Utilitarians—IV. Recent writers of treatises—Strident contradictions. Stammler—V. Value of law—In antiquity—Diderot—Romanticism—Jacobi—Hegel—Recent doctrines—VI. Natural rights and their dissolution—Historical school of rights—Comparison between rights and language—VII. Concept of law, and studies of comparative[Pg xxxvii] rights and of the general Doctrine of law—VIII. Legalism and moral casuistic—Probabilitism and Jesuitic morality—Critique of the concept of the licit—Fichte—Schleiermacher—Rosmini.

      CONCLUSION 586

      The Philosophy of the Spirit as the whole of Philosophy—Correspondence between Logic and System—Dissatisfaction at the end of every system and its irrational motive—Rational motive: inexhaustibility of Life and of Philosophy.

      [Pg xxxviii]

      TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

      This translation of Benedetto Croce's Philosophy of the Practical (Economic and Ethic) is complete.

      FIRST PART

      THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN GENERAL

       Table of Contents

FIRST SECTION

      Practical and theoretic life.

A glance at the life that surrounds us would seem more than sufficient to establish, without the necessity of special demonstration, the existence of a circle of practical activity side by side with the theoretical. We see in life men of thought and men of action, men of contemplation and of action, materially distinct, as it were, from one another: here, lofty brows and slow dreamy eyes; there, narrow brows, eyes vigilant and mobile; poets and philosophers on the one side; on the other, captains and soldiers of industry, commerce, politics, the army, and the church. Their work seems to differ as do the men. While we are intent upon some discovery just announced, in chemistry or in physic, or upon some philosophy that comes to shake old beliefs, upon a drama or a romance that revives an artist's dream, we are suddenly interrupted and our attention is called to spectacles of an altogether different nature, such as a war between two states, fought with cannon or with custom-house tariffs; or to a colossal strike, in which thousands upon thousands of workmen make the rest of society feel the power of their numbers and of their strength, and the importance of their work in the general total; or a potent organization which collects and binds together the forces of conservative resistance, employing interests and passions, hopes and fears, vices and virtues, as the painter his colours, or the poet his words, sometimes making like them a masterpiece, but of a practical nature. The man of action is from time to time assailed as it were with nausea at his orgies of volitional effort and eyes with envy the artist or the man of science in the same way as polite society used to look upon the monks who had known how to select the best and most tranquil lot in life. But as a general rule they do not go beyond this fleeting feeling, or if they do resolve to cease their business on the Ides, they return to it on the Kalends. But the contemplative man in his turn also sometimes experiences this same nausea and this same aspiration; he seems to himself to be idle where so many are working and bleeding, and he cries to the combatants: "Arms, give me arms,"[1] for he too would be a miner with the miners, would navigate with the navigators, be an emperor among the kings of coal. However, as a general rule, he does not make more out of this than a song or a book. Nobody, whatever his efforts, can issue from his own circle. It would seem that nature supplies men made precisely for the one or for the other form of activity, in the same way as she makes males and females for the preservation of the species.

      Insufficiency of descriptive distinctions.

      But this mode of existence with which the practical activity manifests itself in life, as though physically