 These theories are inadequate because they have a deficient conception of the self, a deficiency he begins to remedy in the fifth essay, the famous ‘My Station and Its Duties’, where he outlines a social conception of the self and of morality with such vigour that it is understandable that the mistaken idea that it expresses his own position has gained some currency. This Hegelian account of the moral life, in which the self is fully realized by fulfilling its role in the social organism which grounds its duties, is clearly one which greatly attracted Bradley, and he seems never to have noticed the implicit tension between the metaphysical account of the self as necessarily social and the moral injunction to realize the self in society. But he finally acknowledges its inadequacy, pointing out, for instance, that any actual society may exhibit moral imperfections requiring reform from the standpoint of an ideal which cannot be exemplified in the roles available within that society. This leads him naturally into the next essay’s consideration of ideal morality, where he discusses the scope of morality’s demands on the individual, and, by a further natural extension, into the seventh essay’s discussion of the distinction between the good and the bad self, a discussion which involves an attempted demonstration that the bad self is a kind of unrealizable parasite on the good. This is necessary to his enterprise: without it, he could not hope to make plausible his suggestion that the aim of morality is self-realization. But in one way the enterprise still founders: the final essay argues that morality is ultimately self-contradictory, depending for its existence on the evil it seeks to overcome. Realization of the ideal self is thus unattainable through morality, but the book closes by suggesting that it is still possible in religion.