52. The common doctrine is so full of ambiguities that it readily lends itself to opposite applications. In the first place 'state of nature' may be understood in most different senses. The one idea common to all the writers who suppose such a state to have preceded that of civil society is a negative one. It was a state which was _not_ one of political society, one in which there was no civil government; i.e. no supreme power, exercised by a single person or plurality of persons, which could compel obedience on the part of all members of a society, and was recognised as entitled to do so by them all, or by a sufficient number of them to secure general obedience. But was it one of society at all? Was it one in which men had no dealings with each other except in the way of one struggling to make another serve his will and to get for himself what the other had, or was it one in which there were ties of personal affection and common interest, and recognised obligations, between man and man? Evidently among those who spoke of a state of nature, there were very various and wavering conceptions on this point. They are apt to make an absolute opposition between the state of nature and the political state, and to represent men as having suddenly contracted themselves out of one into the other. Yet evidently the contract would have been impossible unless society in a form very like that distinctively called political had been in existence beforehand. If political society is to be supposed to have originated in a pact at all, the difference between it and the preceding state of nature cannot, with any plausibility, be held to have been much more than a difference between a society regulated by written law and officers with defined power and one regulated by customs and tacitly recognised authority.