Transformation of principles into practical laws: legalism.
Nothing perhaps better makes clear the true nature of laws than the examination of the very grave errors introduced by their means into the Philosophy of the practical: for, owing to the failure to perceive the character of mere aid proper to their function, laws have been confused with practical principles, these being looked upon as laws and those as principles.
Genesis of the concept of the practically licit and indifferent.
We always live surrounded by innumerable laws, although these are always finite in number. The Decalogue also admonishes: "Take not the name of God in vain"; "Honour thy father and thy, mother"; "Thou shalt not steal"; "Thou shalt commit no murder"; "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, nor his wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his"; etc. The decalogue or hectalogue of prudence admonishes us: "Raise not up against thee too many enemies "; "Mind your own business"; "Conciliate him who is more powerful than thou"; "Hurt him who hurts thee"; etc. Those laws that are so many and so minute easily lead to the false belief that they suffice together to regulate our economic action and our moral life, and that practical principles can be substituted for and be fully represented by a Decalogue or code, which should be the true and proper regulator of human life.
But the Decalogue, the code, the Corpus juris, ample and minute though they be, are not, as we know, capable of exhausting the infinity of actions conditioned by the infinite variety of facts. Every law brings with it, as its necessary correlative, as the shadow of its light, actions that are indifferent and indifferentiable, the legally indifferent, the licit, the permissible, the right, the faculty of doing or of not doing. As an inevitable consequence of this, practical principles having been conceived as a series or complex of laws, the concept of the practically indifferent must also be posited and the licit changed from legal to practical.
Consequence of this: the arbitrary.
And this is what happens. At every moment of life we find ourselves face to face with actual situations, to which the laws that we possess either do not apply at all, or apply only in the approximative way that we have seen; at every moment of life, we find ourselves without the guidance of the law, face to face with the indifferent and the indifferentiated. The practical man knows well that the laws were a mere help, merely a preparatory stage to action, and that he must in each case face the actual situation as it arises, intuite and perceive it in its originality, and perform his own action with originality. But he who has accepted the legalitarian conception of the practical activity and has abandoned practical principles as useless or looked upon them as non-existent, now that he finds himself abandoned also by the laws, in which he had put too much trust, has no other guide on which to fall back save his own will.
And will is not a guide but the lack of a guide; it is not action but inaction, that is to say, contradictory action; not activity, but passivity, not prudence and good, but imprudence and evil.
Thus the legalitarian conception of practical principles produces neither more nor less than the death of the practical, installing passivity in the place of activity, evil in the place of good.