ed, unless the individuals concerned seek their own
satisfaction in the issue. They are particular units of society--that
is, they have special needs, instincts, and interests generally,
peculiar to themselves. Among these needs are not only such as we
usually call necessities--the stimuli of individual desire and
volition--but also those connected with individual views and
convictions; or--to use a term expressing less decision--leanings of
opinion, supposing the impulses of reflection, understanding, and
reason, to have been awakened. In these cases people demand, if they are
to exert themselves in any direction, that the object should commend
itself to them, that, in point of opinion-whether as to its goodness,
justice, advantage, profit they should be able to "enter into it"
(_dabei sein_). This is a consideration of special importance in our
age, when people are less than formerly influenced by reliance on
others, and by authority; when, on the contrary, they devote their
activities to a cause on the ground of their own understanding, their
independent conviction and opinion.

We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on
the part of the actors; and--if interest be called passion, inasmuch as
the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible
interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of
volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it--we may
affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished
without passion. Two elements, therefore, enter into the object of our
investigation--the first the Idea, the second the complex of human
passions; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast arras-web of
universal history. The concrete mean and union of the two is liberty,
under the conditions of morality in a State. We have spoken of the idea
of freedom as the nature of Spirit, and the absolute goal of history.
Passion is regarded as a thing of sinister aspect, as more or less
immoral. Man is required to have no passions. Passion, it is true, is
not quite the suitable word for what I wish to express. I mean here
nothing more than human activity as resulting from private interests,
special, or if you will, self-seeking designs--with this qualification,
that the whole energy of will and character is devoted to their
attainment, and that other interests (which would in themselves
constitute attractive aims), or, rather, all thi