In this passage the formula of association, and much of the commentary upon it, imply the “contract” to have been an event in history. Such is the bearing of the words “act of association,” “produces,” “receives,” “forms itself.” It is admitted that Rousseau’s thoughts are always more or less struggling with this conception, which, it must however be remembered, he explicitly refuses to rely on; and henceforward, having sufficiently called attention to it, we shall not encumber ourselves with observing upon it in every instance. Putting aside then the defective terminology, and {93} bearing in mind that Rousseau considers himself to be analysing the essence of that act or character “by which a people is a people,” we find in this passage very far-reaching ideas. We find that the essence of human society consists in a common self, a life and a will, which belong to and are exercised by the society as such, or by the individuals in society as such; it makes no difference which expression we choose. The reality of this common self, in the action of the political whole, receives the name of the “general will,” and we shall examine its nature and attributes in the following chapter. The primary point which it is necessary to make clear, however, is whether the whole set of ideas is to be seriously pressed, or whether the unity which they indicate is merely formal and superficial. For phrases of the kind here employed may be found in many earlier writers. The term “person,” for example, comes through Hobbes from the Roman law. “_Persona_,” in Roman law, we are told, [1] means either a complex of rights or the possessor of those rights, whether an individual or a corporate body. “_Unus homo sustinet plures personas_.” Thus a man may devolve his “_persona_” on another man. A corporation has a single “_persona_.” It is in this sense that for Hobbes, the State is a “real unity in one person,” which person has been devolved by all the individuals of a multitude upon one man or a definite assembly of men, whose acts therefore are, politically speaking, the acts of the whole multitude so united in one “person.” [1] See, _e.g._, Green’s _Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation_, p. 61. {94} This use of the term “person” is one of the cases alluded to in ch. I., where an abstraction of law has preserved the seed of a philosophical idea of unity. How far the unity thus indicated is an empty fiction, or how far it is grasped as something vital, into which the individual mind goes out and in which it finds what its nature demands, is what we now have to consider further. 6. Chapters vii. and viii. of book I. of the _Contrat Social_ show the outcome of Rousseau’s conflicting ideas in a very few remarkable propositions. The question is whether the unity of a body politic is an arbitrary abstraction or a fundamental force and reality.