1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacles which impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are too strong for such forces as each individual can employ in order to keep himself in that state. At this point they can only save themselves by aggregation. Problem: to find a form of association which defends and protects with the whole common force the person and property of each associate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys himself, and remains as free as he was before. Solution: a social compact reducible to these words, "Each of us places in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general will; and we further receive each member as indivisible part of the whole." This act of association constitutes a moral and collective body, a public person. The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the corollary that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them, and also therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of unmaking them. This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the dictator, or divinely commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and human nature alike were passive and infinitely pliable; they were the material out of which the legislator was to devise conventions at pleasure, without apprehension as to their suitableness either to the conditions of society among which they were to work, or to the passions and interests of those by whom they were to be carried out, and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It would be unjust to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took the consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications, and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.[226] But to base society on conventions is to impute an element of arbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make them independent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed by the nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of all the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation.