It is instructive, therefore, to note Bentham’s uncompromising hostility to all the theories of philosophical jurists. The common point of all their theories, from Hobbes and Grotius to Montesquieu and Rousseau, not to mention Kant and his successors, has lain in the fact that their authors divined under the forms of power and command, exercised by some over others, a substantive and general element of positive human nature, which they attempted to drag to light by one analogy after another. But neither Montesquieu’s “eternal relations,” nor the “Social Contract,” nor “General Will,” nor “Natural Rights” of other thinkers find favour in Bentham’s eyes. One and all they are to him fiction and fallacy. He can understand nothing in law but the character of a command; he can see no positive relation of it to human nature beyond the degree in which it dispenses with the pain of restraint while increasing the pleasure of liberty. To describe the magnificent success which {60} attended the use of this rule of thumb in the practical work of reform does not fall within our immediate subject. Our purpose was merely to illustrate the paradox implied in the conception of self-government, by pointing out how fundamentally hostile to one another Bentham took its constituent elements to be. 3. The same point may be further insisted on by examining the main ideas of Mill’s “Liberty,” without by any means professing to give a full account of Mill’s opinions on the relation of individuals to society. What indeed is instructive in his position, for our immediate purpose, is that, having so deep a sense, as he has, of social solidarity, he nevertheless treats the central life of the individual as something to be carefully fenced round against the impact of social forces.