 Pufendorf acknowledges the fundamental reality of self-love and the possibility of reading the natural law as a merely instrumental rule. However, he denies that self-love is the only human motive or necessarily in conflict with other motives, and argues that in fact its aims can be fully or really achieved only through the natural law; this does command humans to love themselves, albeit in a mitigated, restrained, and thus more successful way (DJN II.3.14 and 18). That is, humans are not totally selfish or totally altruistic, but partially both. Hence the natural law does not forbid the pursuit of self-interest but merely regulates it, enjoining both the care of self and the care of others that humans already seek (in a limited and inadequate fashion). If human nature tended toward one or other extreme, the law’s injunctions would be either impossible or unnecessary (i.e., pointless); it is precisely humans’ medial nature, their motivationally mixed constitution, that accounts for the law’s normative force – in both its rational (legitimate reasons) and sanctional (strength) aspects. The argument certainly requires its voluntarist (and theistic) premise, but it relies as much on the compatible (and, supposedly, confirmatory) deliverances of general human experience. In practice, given the stakes involved according to either interpretation, it often may not matter which is emphasized. And this was undoubtedly why (beside its non-theological foundation) Pufendorf’s more perceptive religious critics resisted it and often accused him of Hobbism, and why in turn his secular adherents were not alienated by the deity lingering in the background.