If Grotius had been able to realise theoretically the immanence of the _jus naturale_ in society he would have foreshadowed all the political theories of the eighteenth century, and worked out his scheme with far more cogency than the men who came after him. As it is, the rationality immanent to human society is too difficult for him and his time, and unable to realise the moral will of the collectivity he is thrown back with Machiavelli on a very empirical notion of liberty. The subjectivism of Grotius is the subjectivism of the philosophy of his time alternatively empirical and rational, so that the contract by which men give themselves a form of government is irrevocable: they are free to assume it, not to reject it. Obviously the souvenir of the Reformation with its political struggles must have been quite fresh in the mind of his contemporaries and influenced him, as the Revolution of England was to influence Hobbes; otherwise it would be difficult to understand how men could be considered as free to choose a constitution and not to discard it. The contradiction was too patent not to be noticed, but there again the philosophy of Bacon and his followers influenced too much the thought of the whole century to allow any resolution of the difficult problem. It was the nature of man that led mankind to form communities, and the mechanicalness of this conception was so much a consequence of the mechanism of the philosophy of the time that once such communities had come to a contract entrusting their government to one man or a body of men, the government itself was conceived of as mechanical as Nature, and its laws as irrevocable as natural law. The contradiction inherent in the twofold notion of man’s nature, held by men like Grotius, led them to deny the liberty of man which was the ground of their theory.