The Essay on the Principles of Human Action...essentially implied the whole paradox of his character as a realistic romantic idealist, born into the Christian faith and still retaining after that faith had evaporated an indelible dye of unworldliness. It was the work of a man who, whilst conscious of the omnipresence and permanence of self-interest and evil, was seeking (like his ex-pastor friend Godwin) a logic that would justify, in the teeth of all the evidences and all the pressures of reality, his own incorrigible bias towards that ethic of altruism in which he had been nurtured, while at the same time (unlike Godwin) recognizing the necessary existence and inescapable importunity of those evidences and those pressures. Shaped by the debate between self-interest and benevolence which had exercised English philosophy for the whole of the eighteenth century, from Shaftesbury and Butler onwards, his whole life was to be a sequence of variations on this dichotomy, an unceasing dialogue between the ideal and the real, the one and the many, the abstract and the concrete, the self and others, the potential and the actual, optimism and pessimism, the scholar's study and the market-place, a renewal of what someone he once quoted called ‘the old quarrel between speculation and practice’, a dialogue he was constantly trying to resolve by an appeal from imagination to reason, whose inadequacies he would then correct by an appeal from reason back to imagination. In the Essay he elaborates a purely abstract and ‘metaphysical’ theory of human action, in a general statement which deliberately neglects the phenomenological or even the existential experience of the individual alive in a particular time and place. This paradoxical refusal of individuality was a limitation amply to be corrected in his later work.