the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently well for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of other obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shall point out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of the notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a definition inextricably confused: "Laws are necessary relations flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have their laws, divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws, the intelligences superior to men have their laws, the beasts have their laws, man has his laws.... There is a primitive reason, and laws are the relations to be found between that and the different beings, and the relations of these different beings among one another."[222] Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state, and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing about the other.[223] Hobbes's phraseology is much less definite than this, and shows that he had not himself wholly shaken off the same confusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a century later. But then Hobbes's account of the true meaning of sovereignty was so clear, firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any fairly perspicuous student who followed him, to apply it to the true meaning of law. And on this head of law not so much fault is to be found with Rousseau, as on the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not look long enough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their distinctive qualities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that a law is a command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this, because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumption of contract as the base of the social union.[224] But he did at all events grasp the quality of generality as belonging to laws proper, and separated them justly from what he calls decrees, which we are now taught to name occasional or particular commands.[225] This is worth mentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits of intellectual laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headed master before him, of a very considerable degree of precision of thought, however liable it was to fall into error or deficiency for want of abundant comparison with bodies of external fact. Let us now proceed to some of the central propositions of the Social Contract.