 According to Neo-Confucians, institutions of governance operate on two levels simultaneously, one socio-political and the other personal. At the socio-political level, they are concerned with the practicalities of keeping order in a large state filled with imperfect people. At the personal level they are concerned with an individual’s moral character. Someone might think that operations on these two levels work at cross-purposes, because crafting good institutions and policies requires that we take human imperfections into account, and yet a full commitment to improving one’s character requires that we rise above these imperfections. Neo-Confucians disagree. For them, the continuity of the socio-political with the personal received its canonical expression in a passage from the classical Greater Learning: