Of course, no comparison is quite precise, and it may be urged that the State is more artificial than a human body. However this may be, [1] we shall at least understand Hegel’s attitude better, and, as I venture to think, adopt by far the most fruitful standpoint for ourselves, if we look at political philosophy like one who is trying to ascertain what is the nature of human life as he observes it in any or every human body. If the life is there, its essentials are there, and his aim is to understand them. No doubt a door is here opened to argument with regard to what logicians call a “pure case.” In understanding life “as such,” you must, it would seem, purge out its mere defects, in regard to which it is not “life,” and the remainder, what you pledge yourself to as essential, must be _ex hypothesi_ your “ideal” of life. And perhaps there is no reason to reject this responsibility if confined to the emphasis of elements and interconnection of facts. It cannot apply to more. [1] The comment will probably betray the type of pessimism indicated by Rousseau. See p. 95 above. We cannot construct an ideal body by reducing life, nor an ideal polity by reducing mind, to its pure case or essentials, since we cannot construct {252} organisms [1] or history at all. And it is because this is always being forgotten that the duty of understanding rather than constructing has to be insisted upon. It is true that in understanding, as in constructing, we imply essential relations, and so incur responsibility, and are liable to betray a bias; but still, life can be understood by help of any creature that is alive, and therefore it is not the example with which the student works, but the insight which he shows, that is the decisive point. [1] “No human mind has ever conceived a new animal.” Ruskin, _Modern Painters_, ii. 148. 4. We have to begin by realising what is involved in the fact that we are about to treat the analysis of a Modern State as a chapter in the _Philosophy of Mind_. For Hegel’s _Philosophy of Right_ (or of _Law_), though published by him as an independent work, is essentially an expansion of paragraphs which form one sub-division of his _Philosophy of Mind_, itself the third and concluding portion of the _Encyclopaedia of Philosophy_, of which the two earlier portions are the _Logic_ and the _Philosophy of Nature_.