Understand that this third mode is unacceptable to careful thinkers, as it is impossible for it to be one hundred percent reliable. For since the perceptions formed are ascertained by abstraction from a substance, one might err regarding them. For example, someone with idealistic moral values – by which I mean an irreligious individual – on account of his intensive focus on the quality of truth in its abstract form, even when he could save people from death by telling them a lie, he might decide that were the whole world to perish, he still will not let a deliberate lie escape his lips.
This is not the Torah’s stance, as nothing takes precedence over saving lives (Yoma 82a).16As the author of the Sulam proceeds to explain, these generalizations operate in a vacuum, lacking a substance through which their forms can be expressed. As a result, a person can be misled in his valuing of such abstracted attributes and conceptions, believing them to be inherently good or evil yet failing to realize that such value judgements depend on specific situations and contexts.