differences of method. It is impossible that in the constant play of circumstances and ideas in the minds of different thinkers, the same combinations of form and colour in a philosophic arrangement of such circumstances and ideas should not recur. Signal novelties in thought are as limited as signal inventions in architectural construction. It is only one of the great changes in method, that can remove the limits of the old combinations, by bringing new material and fundamentally altering the point of view. In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to be distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the great historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by the Dutch, we find the Declaration of Independence running, "that if a prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but the prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince." This is obviously divine right, fundamentally modified by a popular principle, accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and to justify after the event a measure which was dictated by urgent need for practical relief. Such a notion of the social compact was still emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can be from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood it. But it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the development of Protestant principles which produced and necessarily involved the extreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided by a suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it inevitable. Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the supreme legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the source or seat of that authority, though he admits the vague position which even Lewis XIV. did not deny, that the object of political society is the greatest good of every citizen or the whole state. In 1603 a Protestant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name, published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the profound indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.[214] Rousseau mentions his name;[215] it does not appear that he read Althusen's rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably have a place in the traditions of political theorising current at Geneva, to the spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicating episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans, had still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and had laid down such propositions as these: "Laws they are not, which