who is only a collective being, can only be represented by himself:  the power may be transmitted, but not the will;"[203] sovereignty is indivisible, not only in principle, but in object;[204] and so forth.  We shall have to consider these remarks from another point of view.  At present we refer to them as illustrating the character of the book, as consisting of a number of expansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared with the facts of which the words are representatives.  This way of treating political theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude and precision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive.  Burke poured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics and algebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seeming demonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau’s disciples with a supreme and undoubting confidence which leaves the modern student of these schemes in amazement unspeakable.  The thinness of Robespierre’s ideas on government ceases to astonish us, when we remember that he had not trained himself to look upon it as the art of dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces.  He had disciplined his political intelligence on such meagre and unsubstantial argumentation as the following:—­“Let us suppose the state composed of ten thousand citizens.  The sovereign can only be considered collectively and as a body; but each person, in his quality as subject, is considered as an individual unit; thus the sovereign is to the subject as ten thousand is to one; in other words, each member of the state has for his share only the ten-thousandth part of the sovereign authority, though he is submitted to it in all his own entirety.  If the people be composed of a hundred thousand men, the condition of the subjects does not change, and each of them bears equally the whole empire of the laws, while his suffrage, reduced to a hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in drawing them up.  Then, the subject remaining still only one, the relation of the sovereign augments in the ratio of the number of the citizens.  Whence it follows that, the larger the state becomes, the more does liberty diminish."[205]

Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the deep charm which their assurance of expression had for the narrow and fervid minds of which England and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchy men, but which still haunted France, there were maxims in the Social Contract of remarkable convenience for the members of a Committee of Public Safety.  “How can a blind multitude,” the writer asks in one place, “which so often does not know its own will, because it seldom knows what is good for it, execute of itself an undertaking so vast and so difficult as a system of legislation?"[206] Again, “as nature gives to each man an absolute power over all his members, so the social pact gives