46. Throughout these statements we are moving in a region of fiction from which Spinoza keeps clear. Not only is the supposition of the devolution of wills or powers on a sovereign by a covenant historically a fiction (about that no more need be said); the notion of an obligation to observe this covenant, as distinct from a compulsion, is inconsistent with the supposition that there is no right other than power prior to the act by which the sovereign power is established. If there is no such right antecedent to the establishment of the sovereign power, neither can there be any after its establishment except in the sense of a power on the part of individuals which the sovereign power enables them to exercise. This power, or 'jus civile,' cannot itself belong to the sovereign, who enables individuals to exercise it. The only right which can belong to the sovereign is the 'jus naturale,' [1] consisting in the superiority of his power, and this right must be measured by the inability of the subjects to resist. If they _can_ resist, the right has disappeared. In a successful resistance, then, to an ostensibly sovereign power, there can on the given supposition be no wrong done to that power. To say that there is, would be a contradiction in terms. Is such resistance, then, a violation of the 'jus civile' as between the several subject citizens? In the absence of a sovereign power, no doubt, the 'jus civile' (according to the view in question, which makes it depend on the existence of an 'imperium') would cease to exist. But then a successful resistance would simply show that there was no longer such a sovereign power. It would not itself be a violation of 'jus civile,' but simply a proof that the conditions of 'jus civile' were no longer present. It might at the same time be a step to re-establishing them if, besides being a proof that the old 'imperium' no longer exists, it implied such a combination of powers as suffices to establish a new one. [1] 'The 'jus naturale' is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say of his own life; and consequently of doing anything which in his own judgment and reason he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.' (_Lev_., I. 14.)