e in themselves powerless. Therefore he put into the
circumstances of life and into the pedagogic formation of character the
reality of ethics. He might have been taken for Owen if he had not been
a retrograde.

I am speaking of that ethics which exists prosaically and in an
empirical and current fashion, in the inclinations, the habits, the
customs, the counsels, the judgments and the appreciations of ordinary
mortals. I am speaking of that ethics which as suggestion, as impulse
and as bridle, appears in different degrees of development, and more or
less unmistakably, although in a fragmentary fashion, among all men; by
the very fact of association because each occupies a definite position
in the association, they naturally and necessarily reflect upon their
own works and the works of others, and they conceive obligations and
appreciations and all the first elements of general precepts.

There is the _factum_; and what is most important is that this _factum_
appears to us varied and multiple in the different conditions of life,
and variable through history. This _factum_ is the _datum_ of research.
Facts are neither true nor false, as Aristotle already knew. Systems, on
the contrary, theologic or rational, may be true or false because they
aim to comprehend, explain and complete the fact, by bringing that fact
to another fact, or integrating it with another.

Some points of preliminary theory are henceforth settled, in all that
concerns the interpretation of this _factum_.

The will does not choose of itself, as was supposed by the inventors of
_free will_, that product of the impotency of the psychological analysis
not yet arrived at maturity. Volitions, in so far as they are facts of
consciousness, are particular expressions of the psychic mechanism.
They are a result, first of necessities, and then, of all that precedes
them up to the very elementary organic impulse.

Ethics does not place itself nor does it engender itself. There is no
such universal foundation of the ethical relations varied and variable,
as that spiritual entity which has been called the _moral conscience_,
one and unique for all men. This abstract entity has been eliminated by
criticism like all other such entities, that is to say, like all the
faculties of the soul. What a beautiful explanation of the fact, in
truth, to assume the generalization of the fact itself as a means of
explanation. People reasoned thus: the sensations, the percepti