We may approach the matter in this way. The paradox is, that if you scrutinise the acts which have made States, and which carry them on, or which go on under and within them, you will every where be able to urge that they spring from self-interest and ambition--not from a desire for the common good. How then can we say that the State exists for a common good? Hegel’s large conception of a social fabric and the temper of mind which maintains it should have done some thing to meet this problem. But we may come a little closer to the precise difficulty. Nothing is so fallacious as mere psychological analysis applied to the estimation of the purposes which rule a mind. In every act there is necessarily an aspect of the agent’s particular self. One way or another he is satisfied in it. So the pessimistic or superficial psychologist can always--not in some acts merely, but in all--discover a form of self-seeking. Life is a whole made up of particulars, and the universal is a connection within them, not another particular outside them; it is a mistake of principle to suppose that any act can be outside the tissue of aims, impulses, and emotions which affect the sensitive self. Great purposes work through these affections and transform them, but {292} cannot obliterate them without obliterating life. “There is nothing degrading in being alive.” [1] But there is a kind of eye which sees all these particulars apart from the substantive aims which give them their character, and treats them as if they were the sole determining motives of the agent. Hegel calls such a critic--he is thinking especially of historians--“the psychological valet, for whom there are no heroes, not because they are no heroes, but because he is only a valet.” On the whole, a man is what he does. If his series of actions has the root of the matter in it, it is wrong either for him to be deterred, or for a critic to carp, because they bring him gain or glory, or gratify him by activity and excitement. To shrink from particular occasions of action because one’s self may find satisfaction in them is to fall back into the mere general willing of the abstract good. And “the laurels of mere willing are dry leaves that never have been green.” [1] _Rechtsphil._, sect. 123. We may illustrate these ideas from the life of the ordinary members of States, and from the career of a great ruler or conqueror. [1] [1] Green, _Principles of Political Obligation_, sects. 121 and 128.