Man, feeble and powerless when he is alone, profoundly feels the need that he has of the succor of his fellow-creatures in order to develop his faculties, to embellish his life, and even to preserve it.[238] Without reflection, without convention, he claims the hand, the experience, the love of those whom he sees made like himself. The instinct of society is in the first cry of the child that calls for the mother's help without knowing that it has a mother, and in the eagerness of the mother to respond to the cries of the child. It is in the feelings for others that nature has put in us--pity, sympathy, benevolence. It is in the attraction of the sexes, in their union, in the love of parents for their children, and in the ties of every kind that these first ties engender. If Providence has attached so much sadness to solitude, so much charm to society, it is because society is indispensable for the preservation of man and for his happiness, for his intellect and moral development. But if need and instinct begin society, it is justice that completes it. In the presence of another man, without any external law, without any compact,[239] it is sufficient that I know that he is a man, that is to say, that he is intelligent and free, in order to know that he has rights, and to know that I ought to respect his rights as he ought to respect mine. As he is no freer than I am, nor I than he, we recognize towards each other equal rights and equal duties. If he abuses his force to violate the equality of our rights, I know that I have the right to defend myself and make myself respected; and if a third party is found between us, without any personal interest in the quarrel, he knows that it is his right and his duty to use force in order to protect the feeble, and even to make the oppressor expiate his injustice by a chastisement. Therein is already seen entire society with its essential principles,--justice, liberty, equality, government, and punishment. Justice is the guaranty of liberty. True liberty does not consist in doing what we will, but in doing what we have a right to do. Liberty of passion and caprice would have for its consequence the enslavement of the weakest to the strongest, and the enslavement of the strongest themselves to their unbridled desires. Man is truly free in the interior of his consciousness only in resisting passion and obeying justice; therein also is the type of true social liberty. Nothing is falser than the opinion that society diminishes our mutual liberty; far from that, it secures it, develops it: what it suppresses is not liberty; it is its opposite, passion. Society no more injures liberty than justice, for society is nothing else than the very idea of justice realized.