67. The result to the individual may be stated thus. He exchanges the natural liberty to do and get what he can, a liberty limited by his relative strength, for a liberty at once limited and secured by the general will; he exchanges the mere possession of such things as he can get, a possession which is the effect of force, for a property founded on a positive title, on the guarantee of society. At the same time he becomes a moral agent. Justice instead of instinct becomes the guide of his actions. For the moral slavery to appetite he substitutes the moral freedom which consists in obedience to a self-imposed law. Now for the first time it can be said that there is anything which he _ought_ to do, as distinguished from that which he is _forced_ to do. (I, viii.) 68. Such language makes it clear that the sovereignty of which Rousseau discusses the origin and attributes, is something essentially different from the supreme coercive power which previous writers on the 'jus civile' had in view. A contemporary of Hobbes had said that 'there's on earth a yet auguster thing, Veiled though it be, than Parliament and King.' It is to this 'auguster thing,' not to such supreme power as English lawyers held to be vested in 'Parliament and King,' that Rousseau's account of the sovereign is really applicable. What he says of it is what Plato or Aristotle might have said of the θεῖος νοῦς, [1] which is the source of the laws and discipline of the ideal polity, and what a follower of Kant might say of the 'pure practical reason,' which renders the individual obedient to a law of which he regards himself, in virtue of his reason, as the author, and causes him to treat humanity equally in the person of others and in his own always as an end, never merely as a means. But all the while Rousseau himself thinks that he is treating of the sovereign in the ordinary sense; in the sense of some power of which it could be reasonably asked how it was established in the part where it resides, when and by whom and in what way it is exercised. A reader of him who is more or less familiar with the legal conception of sovereignty, but not at all with that of practical reason or of a 'general will.' a common ego, which wills nothing but what is for the common good, is pretty sure to retain the idea of supreme coercive power as the attribute of sovereignty, and to ignore the attribute of pure disinterestedness, which, according to Rousseau, must characterise every act that can be ascribed to the sovereign. [1] [Greek θεῖος νοῦς (theios nous) = divine mind or intelligence Tr]