Here we must consider a little more fully the nature of the collective or general will, a subject that has figured largely in the discussions of political philosophers on the nature of the State. Rousseau wrote—“There is often a great difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter looks only to the common interest; the former looks to private interest, and is nothing but a series of individual wills; but take away from these same wills the plus and minus that cancel one another and there remains, as the sum of the differences, the general will.” “Sovereignty is only the exercise of the general will.” By this he seems to mean that a certain number of men will the general good, while many will only their private goods; and that while the latter neutralise one another, as regards their effects on the general interest, the former co-operate and so form an effective force to promote the general good. This doctrine was an approximation towards the truth, though like all Rousseau’s social speculations, his handling of it was vitiated by his false psychology, which set out from the fiction of man as an independent purely self-contained and self-determining absolute individual. Later writers do not seem to have improved upon Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will to any great extent. The problem of the general will, like all problems of collective psychology, becomes extremely complex when we consider the life of nations; and it is, therefore, important to make ourselves clear as to the nature of collective volition by consideration of the relatively simple case of a patriot army. It is of course impossible to arrive at a clear notion of collective volition, until individual volition has been clearly defined and the nature of the distinction between it, on the one hand, and mere impulsive action, desire, and simple conflict of desires, on the other hand, has been made clear. The lack of such clear notions and adequate definitions has rendered much of the discussion of this topic by political philosophers sterile and obscure. In the light of the conclusions reached in my chapter on individual volition[31], the question of the nature of collective volition presents little difficulty. It was found that volition may be defined and adequately marked off from the simpler modes of conation by saying that it is the reinforcement of any impulse or conation by one excited within the system of the self-regarding sentiment. And in an earlier chapter[32] it was shewn how the self-regarding sentiment may become extended to other objects than the individual self, to all objects with which the self identifies itself, which are regarded as belonging to the self or as part of the wider self. This extension depends largely on the fact that others identify us with such an object, so that we feel ourselves to be an object of all the regards and attitudes and actions of others directed towards that object, and are emotionally affected by them in