But Hobbes was English and, despite the influence of French Rationalism, his logic was not so imperious as to prevent his views on actual life from taking the upper hand in some important parts of his system. Such an artificial agglomeration of political atoms, understood as it was to be the most realistic and naturalistic view of political life, could not have stood the test of application; and Hobbes is carried away by his own notion of the contract into a theoretical view of it which is distinctly superior in moral truth, and much nearer to historical truth. When men come to an agreement for the defence of the peaceful life of each of them the state comes into being; but it is not a temporary, mechanical agglomeration—it is unity wanted by men. In his natural state man enjoys some kind of security based on the _concordia multorum_, but this concord is not sufficient to ensure peace, it is merely enough for animals. To ensure human peace something more than common consent is needed. Union, the union of citizens becomes something superior to the sum of their particular selfishnesses. Hobbes realises that such union is a living reality and even if he does not work out the way by which the notion of the state as a person can be reached, he none the less joins hands with all political idealism. In the middle of the seventeenth century he had an intuition of the conception upon which the Nationalism of all countries was to live and act; whilst Hegel was to work it out in an abstract theory and Italian Idealism to make it a reality by its good fortune in having met with a political movement able to realise this most historical of all the philosophical conceptions of the state. Hobbes had had enough political experience to realise intuitively that which his natural mechanism did not allow him to conceive on theoretical grounds. Such a happy intuition does not, however, take him any farther. His state has nothing of a moral reality, and the union of the citizens which it implies falls back on the ground of the law of self-preservation. The fact is that the state so conceived by Hobbes was an abstraction despite the happy intuition of the oneness of will implied in the contract; and his natural man another abstraction not to be met with anywhere. The identification of man and state only happens in history and there it was to remain, unlooked for in England until Hume, whilst in Italy Vico was to herald the reality of society and history as the creation of man between 1720 and 1730. Thus, like Grotius, Hobbes ended by denying the freedom of will that the very possibility of the contract had implied. His ideal state, his empirical state, his natural state, are so conceived that they continually oppose each other or are identified one with the other in his theory.