But where is the seat of this supreme power? Certainly not in a superindividual, who dominates individuals, but in individuals themselves. And in this case its power and value correspond with the power of the individuals who compose it; that is to say, it is the law of a circle, empirically considered to be larger and stronger, but whose volitions are realized in so far as the individuals composing it spontaneously conform to them, because they recognize the convenience of doing so. Monarchs who believed themselves to be most powerful, have realized at certain moments that the power did not at all reside in their persons or title, but in a universal consensus of opinion, failing which their power vanished, or was reduced to a gesture of solitary command, not far removed from the ridiculous. Laws that seem to be excellent remain unapplied, because they meet with tacit general resistance, or as is said, do not accord with custom: this should suffice to enlighten the mind as to the inseverable unity of what is called the State and what is called society. The State is not a being, but a mobile complex of varied relations between individuals. It may be convenient to limit this complex as well as possible, to make a being of it to oppose other complexes: of this there can be no doubt; and let us leave to jurists the excogitation of these and other similar distinctions, fictitious but opportune; nor let us consider that their work should be declared in the least absurd. We only say that it must not be forgotten that the fictitious is fictitious, as is the claim made to reason about it as rational and philosophical, and to fill volumes and volumes with tiresome disquisitions, which are necessarily vain, though the distinctions that form their object are not vain in their circle. We who are not jurists but philosophers, and to whom it is therefore not permitted to produce and adopt practical distinctions, must conceive as laws and include equally in the same category, alike the English _Magna Charta_ and the statute of the Sicilian _Mafia,_ or of the Neapolitan _Camorra;_ the _Regula monachorum_ of Saint Benedict and that of the _brigata spendereccia_ that was sung in sonnets by Folgore di San Geminiano and Cene della Chitarra and is recorded by Dante in the _Inferno;_ the canon law and the military code, and that _droit parisien,_ which a certain personage of Balzac had studied for three years in the blue boudoir of one lady and in the rosy drawing-room of another, and which, although no one ever speaks of it, yet constitutes (says the great novelist) _une haute jurisprudence sociale, qui, bien apprise et bien pratiquée, mène à tout._[1] What more can be said? Even those _literary and artistic laws are laws_ which express the will to produce works, possessing this or that other kind of argument and arrangement, as would be the law that drama should be divided into five or three acts or _days,_ and that romances must not exceed four or five hundred