These principles, thus set up in the abstract, we cannot but take as correct; yet ambiguity begins at once. Man is free; this is no doubt the substantive nature of man; and in the State it is not only not abandoned, but in fact it is therein first established. The freedom of nature, the capacity of freedom, is not the actual freedom; {240} for nothing short of the State is the actualisation of freedom. But the misunderstanding about the “_General Will_” begins at the following point. The notion of Freedom must not be taken in the sense of the casual free-will of each individual, but in the sense of the reasonable will, the will in and for itself. [6] The general will is not to be regarded as compounded of the expressed individual wills, [7] so that these remain absolute; else the proposition would be true, “where the minority has to obey the majority, there is no freedom.” Rather the general will must be the rational will, even though people are not aware of it; the State, therefore, is no such association as is determined upon by individuals. The false apprehension of these principles does not matter to us. What matters to us is that by their means it comes as a content into consciousness, that man has in his mind Freedom as the downright absolute, that the free will is the notion of man. It is just freedom that is the self of thought; one who repudiates thought and talks of freedom knows not what he is saying. The oneness of thought with itself [8] is freedom, the free will. Thought, only taken in the form of will, is the impulse to break through [9] one’s mere subjectivity, is relation to definite being, realisation of one’s {241} self, inasmuch as I will to make myself as an existent adequate to myself as thinking. The will is free only as that which thinks. The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite. This furnishes the transition to the Kantian philosophy, which, from a theoretical point of view, took this principle as its basis. Knowledge [10] was thus directed upon its own freedom, and upon a concrete content, [10] which it possesses in its consciousness.” [1] In the place referred to, _Contrat Social_, Bk. I. chs. iii., iv., Rousseau points out clearly that _force_ gives _no right_. So when Hegel describes him as saying that the right of rule rested on force, etc., _in its historical aspect_, this is incorrect unless it means that, this “historical” aspect giving no explanation of right, the term “right” is a mere name so far as it is concerned. [2] _Cont. Social_, Bk. I., iv. [3] I retain Hegel’s paraphrastic rendering of Rousseau’s words. [4] _Cont. Social_, Bk. I., iv., cf. p. 89 above. [5] Hegel’s italics.