" It remains to be seen, nevertheless, whether this
is as clear as it seems, in the case of a man like myself, who am at the
same time reasonable and yet nothing but a dilettante, which of course
would be the abomination of desolation.
It was with a very profound insight that Benedetto Croce, in his
philosophy of the spirit in relation to esthetics as the science of
expression and to logic as the science of pure concept, divided
practical philosophy into two branches--economics and ethics. He
recognizes, in effect, the existence of a practical grade of spirit,
purely economical, directed towards the singular and unconcerned with
the universal. Its types of perfection, of economic genius, are Iago and
Napoleon, and this grade remains outside morality. And every man passes
through this grade, because before all else he must wish to be himself,
as an individual, and without this grade morality would be inexplicable,
just as without esthetics logic would lack meaning. And the discovery of
the normative value of the economic grade, which seeks the hedonic, was
not unnaturally the work of an Italian, a disciple of Machiavelli, who
speculated so fearlessly with regard to _virtu_, practical efficiency,
which is not exactly the same as moral virtue.
But at bottom this economic grade is but the rudimentary state of the
religious grade. The religious is the transcendental economic or
hedonic.
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