Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first rank in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy of government.  Hobbes’s speculations did not fit in with the theory of either of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War.  They were each in the theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or was able to comprehend the application of philosophic principles to their own case or to that of their adversaries.[220] Hebrew precedents and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and high church doctrine, on the other.  Between these was no space for the acceptance of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field of a social constitution.  Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was very marked, and very singular.  There were numerous differences between the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of Malmesbury.  The one looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad.  The one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a state of war.  The one believed that laws and institutions had depraved man, the other that they had improved him.[221] But these differences did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau.  It resulted in a curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the conclusions of Locke.  This fusion produced that popular absolutism of which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin supremacy the practical manifestation.  Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two together he made the great image of the sovereign people.  Strike the crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently well for the Social Contract.  Apart from a multitude of other obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shall point out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of the notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in Montesquieu’s work.  The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a definition inextricably confused:  “Laws are necessary relations flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have their laws, divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws, the intelligences superior to men have their laws, the beasts have their laws, man has his laws....  There is a primitive reason, and laws are the relations to be found between that and the different beings, and the relations of these different beings among one another."[222] Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state, and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing about the other.[223] Hobbes’s phraseology is much less definite than this, and shows that he had not himself wholly shaken off the same confusion as reigned