For Windelband, as for Kantians and neo-Kantians in general, there are only three normative categories, three universal norms—­those of the true or the false, the beautiful or the ugly, and the morally good or evil.  Philosophy is reduced to logics, esthetics, and ethics, accordingly as it studies science, art, or morality.  Another category remains excluded—­namely, that of the pleasing and the unpleasing, or the agreeable and the disagreeable:  in other words, the hedonic.  The hedonic cannot, according to them, pretend to universal validity, it cannot be normative.  “Whosoever throws upon philosophy,” wrote Windelband, “the burden of deciding the question of optimism and pessimism, whosoever demands that philosophy should pronounce judgement on the question as to whether the world is more adapted to produce pain than pleasure, or vice versa—­such a one, if his attitude is not merely that of a dilettante, sets himself the fantastic task of finding an absolute determination in a region in which no reasonable man has ever looked for one.”  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.  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.