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. Religion is a transcendental economy and hedonistic. That which
man seeks in religion, in religious faith, is to save his own
individuality, to eternalize it, which he achieves neither by science,
nor by art, nor by ethics. God is a necessity neither for science, nor
art, nor ethics; what necessitates God is religion. And with an insight
that amounts to genius our Jesuits speak of the grand business of our
salvation. Business--yes, business; something belonging to the economic,
hedonistic order, although transcendental. We do not need God in order
that He may teach us the truth of things, or the beauty of them, or in
order that He may safeguard morality by means of a system of penalties
and punishments, but in order that He may save us, in order that He may
not let us die utterly. And because this unique longing is the longing
of each and every normal man--those who are abnormal by reason of their
barbarism or their hyperculture may be left out of the reckoning--it is
universal and normative.

Religion, therefore, is a transcendental economy, or, if you like,
metaphysic. Together with its logical, esthetic, and ethical values, the
Universe has for man an economic value also, which, when thus made
un